Hello all,
I’d like to humbly request the community’s help with an unusual sort of work in progress. I am currently using Blender to generate stimuli for fMRI experiments, and I need more mesh objects!
I am a postdoc in the Gallant laboratory (www.gallantlab.org) at UC Berkeley.
Our lab’s goal is to understand how the human visual cortex processes the objects we see in the world. You may have seen some of our lab’s recent work - we’re currently in Time magazine’s list of the 100 coolest inventions of 2011 for the research behind this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsjDnYxJ0bo (If you want to see a less hyperbolic write-up of the work, check out http://www.economist.com/node/21534748 or our lab’s web site.)
One of our current projects involves using simulated scenes instead of photographs - so WE NEED YOUR .BLEND FILES! If you have an object that you’ve modeled or an animation you’ve created that you would be willing to share, please send the .blend file to blender#dot#vision#dot#project$at$gmail#dot#com (with symbols removed and the obvious substitutions made). Your work will be used for scientific purposes only, and will only be shared with other scientists. If you email, I will be happy to verify for you that I am who I say I am.
We can use scenes and objects that are either realistic or cartoony. Rigged / animated objects are great, but not necessary. Realistic animals, humans, vehicles, buildings, tools, and plants are particularly useful to us (especially animals!). If you REALLY want to be nice, you can use the formatting guide below to organize your file(s), which will make it much easier for us to incorporate your work into our object library.
Thanks for reading this and we hope you can help!
Mark
P.S. Many thanks to those who have posted work to www.blendswap.org!
Formatting guide for .blend files: (I have listed these things in order of priority - that is, my life will be easier if you are willing to do at least the first few of these for me. Feel free to follow as many or as few of these as you want, so long as you send us your files! )
Language note: Since it is common to model things like a car with multiple mesh objects, I will refer to the whole car as an “entity” and the individual mesh objects as “objects”.
(1) All of the objects composing each individual entity (a car, a duck, whatever) should be grouped, and each group should be named something sensible (“Car_01”, “Duck”, etc). Even one-object entities (i.e., objects composed of a single mesh) should be put into groups.
(2) The maximum dimension of each whole entity should be (exactly) 10 blender units.
(3) Anything with rigging / IPO curves should be stored in blender 2.5/2.6 format.
(4) Each entity should have its own scene.