the bee's knees

Things to do with knees:

1. You can put them in jars.

2. You can take x-rays of them.

3. You can make t-shirt designs out of them.

The actual assignment was to take a pre-existing knee model and give it some color and texture.

...Okay, I went a little crazy with the glass jars. But otherwise, you've just got a disembodied knee, and almost EVERYONE puts their knees on bases, and I can only look at so many knees on bases. I intend to redo (several) certain aspects of this as time allows.

The x-ray and "ink-and-paint" images were simple texturing assignments; we made suitable textures within 3ds Max and applied them to the model. And the x-ray was significantly Photoshopped.

More detail about the realistic-image assignment:

(if I could do a basic lj-cut here without implementing all sorts of javascript, I would. arghh.)

• We (the rest of the class and I) started with DICOM images from the female Visible Human dataset.

• We cleaned up the images as necessary in Mimics.

• We exported a polygon model that we could work with in 3ds Max.

• We... messed around with textures for a week.

• In brief: you can take any given image and apply it to any given model. I could put a photo of the Grand Canyon on my red blood cells, if I felt some need to do so. However, because 2D images and 3D models aren't usually in sync with each other, you often need to do some work on the 3D model (we use UVW maps) so the 2D image doesn't look wonky when it's applied.

  
  

  ...So we did that. Which took some time.

• Once we had a decent UVW map, we exported it as a nice flat JPG or TIF or whatever floated our respective boats.

• We opened the JPG/TIF/etc. in Photoshop and:

• threw some bony colors at it.

• opened a new file--based on the bony-colored Photoshop file--converted it to black and white, and made a bump map. Bump maps give your model some (faux) bumps; white areas are translated into higher elevations, and black areas are deeper valleys.

• We applied these 2D color and bump images to our 3D models.

• ....and repeated as necessary/ad infinitum.

Whew. Glad that's mostly over, anyway.

[3ds Max 2009]