Hi All,
I’ve been putting together a schematic 3D representation of all the muscles of the equine forelimb. I’m working on creating a biomechanical model for muscular load sharing in the limb for my PhD, and this 3D model is a useful tool for simple visualization purposes. It gives a good impression of the complexity of the problem and allows for a visual discussion of the mechanical system with anyone unfamiliar with the anatomy (ie: most mechanical engineers other than myself!).
The work so far looks like this:
An 800x600 DivX 5.0.5 codec animation (rotation) is available here:
http://www.warpax.com/temp/muscles_800x600.avi (1.2 MB)
The bones were digitized as point clouds using a Faro 3D digitizing arm connected to Rhino3D, and were then meshed manually as subdivision surfaces within Blender. I was planning to use Blender for everything except the initial point-cloud acquisition, but I can’t find a simple way to create the muscle “tubes”. So, I created them in 3D Studio Max R3.1 as renderable curve objects, and then used Max for the rendering.
Does anybody know how I can create simple tubes like these in Blender? They must be easy to manipulate since I’m still working on the exact model for the muscles, and so I need to be able to move the curves around easily. Is there a simple way to create a loft/extrusion along a Bezier curve in Blender? Is there a good tutorial on this? (I really want to be 100% Blender, and this is annoying me!!!)
The bones are almost complete. The only ones missing are the fused radius and ulna, the second and fourth metacarpals (splint bones), the accessory carpal and the paired proximal sesamoids. Eventually, I’d like to build proper 3D surface models for the muscles as well, but I’m leaving that job until after I have a set of bones fully digitized. All of the intrinsic and extrinsic muscles (+/- a few extra heads which the anatomists can bicker about) are shown in the model.
Jonathan Merritt.