This week 13 to 19 October was learning Dutch yet again and watching movies. I also went to the zoo.
The last couple of days I’ve finally hit a point in the Duolingo course where I’m rather fed up at my seeming inability to get any further – I’m stuck between learning business lingo, learning governmental lingo and learning the pluperfect. I’ve found a Dutch phrasebook in my local bookstore. It’ll do.
Today’s picture is a 3D reconstruction of my spine from a CT scan using completely open source software. Here’s how I did it:
- Hang around radiology clinic for an extra ten minutes while they run off a CD. My CD contained scans in a standard medical format called DICOM. It also contained a viewer that was slow and sucked.
- If you want a much cooler DICOM viewer, check out the open source 3D Slicer. One of its niftiest tricks is that it can reconstruct the two other views from one single CT scan, and if you hold shift while mousing over the scan it’ll snap the other axes to the part you’re looking at.
- If you want to actually 3Dify what you’ve scanned, copy the DICOM data to hard drive and load it into InVesalius (if you can’t read the DICOM data, batch-convert it to PNG or something using XnView)
- Use InVesalius to convert the bits you want into an STL (or OBJ, or whatever)
- Import the STL (or OBJ or whatever) into Blender (Blender 2.72a was released this week). It will probably be big.
The object I ended up with was kind of noisy because the threshold for 3D version was set to allow more of the bone mass. Could have cleaned it up but didn’t. If you want to see this process from start to finish done right, check out Cicero Moraes demoing his workflow for turning CT scan into a viable 3D model.
Sunday is my usual intensive creativity day. But I was fed up with even being in front of computers so I went to to the zoo instead. (The Other Tumblr is about to get a burst of activity after absolutely nothing for weeks.) To my delight, I found out the Nocturnal House has started installing off-white globes in some of the enclosures instead of black ones which means.. well, have a look for yourself. 🙂
To my irritation however, Perth Zoo no longer have a restaurant that makes steak sandwiches with beetroot. Oh well.
There’s been no progress on A moment in the sun, just like the rest of this month. I loaded up Pointy’s rig today to try to do a backwards run cycle and found a video for the record-holder for the fastest backwards run. It really is impressive.
I had the good fortune of seeing a recent Australian movie called Satellite Boy, made in my own home state of Western Australia albeit at pretty much the opposite end. (I’m in the Perth area, the film was shot up in the Kimberley.) My favourite aspect of Satellite Boy is how it offers both the idea of the land being a merciless and all-ruining force on one hand (the same reality that makes Australians so good at post-apoc), and through other eyes the land is Country – a provider and home to those who would seek to understand its ways through the old stories and walking it. If you’re after a gentle road movie about the struggle between traditional and contemporary living with some gorgeous never-before-filmed Australian desert scenery, I’d highly recommend it.
That’s about it for this week. Starting on Tuesday I’m jetting off to the Blender Conference in Amsterdam. I’ll try and file some form of report from there around the usual time but it will be later than normal because of timezones.
For those of you at the Blender Conference next week, I will attempt to attach some sort of quoll to my person for easy identification. 🙂
