Anatomy and Art

For me, this New Years was about getting this done in time to have a 2020 signature on it. The last year has been different. This was my shot at capturing a little of that.

So, my dog is having an osteotomy today to correct a knee injury, and as I’m looking over the timeline for rehabilitation and recovery, I’m reminded of an old project from grad school. Basically this was intended to be a design for a click through lesson in basic bone healing, but I thought I’d post the old sketches here now. Maybe while I’m watching her, especially these first days, I’ll document and draw something up more specific to what she’s going through.

The other day I was in my car and listening to some local radio where a woman was complaining about sex education in schools. And it got me to wondering about how parents are handling that now that so much of public education has been thrown back into the hands of parents now. Do they have good resources at their discretion? And I thought about how nice it might be to create a few videos to cover some basics there, as a tool for parents or other educators to use. If you did it right, and got a videographer, a few experts to cover some basics, and with my skill set I could definitely create an animation to go into some of the cellular stuff. You could cover basic reproduction broad strokes. You could have a video specifically catered to homosexual sex. You could go through basic protections, how they work, and why they are important, and how STD or pregnancy testing work. I would love to find a grant for something like that. We have so many experienced educators and speakers on matters of sexual education here in Austin. The local series Bedpost Confessions has really encouraged that and made it visible. I think it would be very possible to create something to help with young people and educators here.

Recently I finally finished a painting that I have been getting stuck with and coming back to again and again over years now. I’m really happy to finally see it finished.

This morning I learned that Adobe is cutting off all subscription services in Venezuela.  This is apparently to comply with Executive Order 13884, which requires US companies to stop doing business in Venezuela.  I find this highly disturbing.

Now if you are a regular reader here, you know already that I am not a fan of the new subscription based model for Adobe, or other working software.  But it never once occurred to me that by government order, you could just wipe out the industry standard set of tools for an entire country like that.  We’ve basically just weaponized the lousy subscription model that so many companies are using now.  And this feels especially dangerous in this case with so much important communication coming through Adobe’s software.  When local media covers a story, they often use Adobe products to put it together and get it out there.  When non-profits need to promote a message, they often use things like Illustrator and In-Design.  I personally work for a publisher and we rely on Adobe all the time.  It’s unfathomable to me what would happen if we were to suddenly lose access to it.

And yes, as if the Venezuelan people haven’t had enough to contend with of late, now an entire industry is being stripped of their tools.  Even if they learn new ones, most international jobs will be out of reach without access to that industry standard.  Also, many individual artists use services like Behance to promote their work and Adobe’s cloud storage to keep files.  They are now faced with having to find somewhere else for all of that or lose their work completely.

So far I haven’t heard about other software doing the same, but if Adobe is doing this to comply with U.S. law, it stands to reason that other companies will make the same choice, or spend the next years in court.

And just to kick that extra bit of sand in the wound, they aren’t even refunding the money Venezuelans have already paid for the services they are now being denied.  According to Adobe, to refund customers would not comply with ceasing all activity there.  Sure seems to me like they could get to that now before the 28th when they officially cut service.

This is just such a mess.

It’s that time of year again, where all the anatomy buffs out there get to snidely critique the realism of the gore in all the new movies, and think about what people would look like if the cheap decoration skeletons were accurate. For me, it’s often the animal skeletons that include ears that bug me.  They do it, so they can emote a little, and so everyone knows the dog from the cat and whatnot, but just no, the skeletons don’t have ears like that!  And yet other departures from reality don’t bother me at all.  What can I say?  I guess I care about skeletons.

For the past year, maybe year and a half now, I’ve been making a lot of these astronomy animations for Macmillan. I really enjoy them. Most of the topics just lend themselves so well to 3D animation.  Some of them wind up being really interesting math puzzles, and you even discover very real things just playing with the settings sometimes.

In this particular animation, we wanted to show students the ecliptic, but we wanted to be able to show it to them before introducing the concept of the celestial sphere.  Most textbooks reference the celestial sphere in defining the ecliptic, so already we had this complication in how we were going to come at this.

I was also pretty challenged by the idea of how can we come from an out of orbit view into a view within orbit.  When I’m building these, I find myself setting up a lot of nulls within nulls within nulls to define different movements (orbit, rotation, angle…)  I have found that putting a camera in different levels of these nulls can be really revealing.  And in this case, I was able to go from a static camera which shared the exact position of a camera in orbit at a particular frame, so that I could switch from one camera to the next and move from that wider view into a closer view of Earth that follows it’s orbit without breaking continuity.

Fun fact: By putting the camera in a different null earlier on, I actually accidentally stumbled into a nice visualization for the analemma.  If your camera is in orbit with the Earth, and always pointed toward the sun, you can see the poles on Earth wobble toward and away from the sun, as the constant angle of the axis faces along the same XYZ coordinate in it’s orbit.  But that was a little distracting for this one.

For this one, it made more sense to go with keeping the camera on a fixed side of Earth and letting the light appear to orbit around it, even though it was actually the Earth and camera in a null orbiting the light the whole time.  This wound up being perfect for showing that transition from a heliocentric view to a geocentric one.  The illusion was already there.  And setting up a mini sun in perfect sync was easy enough.

And then, because we wanted to reference the background stars, and the zodiac constellations are literally the constellations along the ecliptic, we got to pull that in as well.  We used the spring zodiac constellations, and at first I messed this up, but when the south pole is oriented toward the sun, that’s our winter, and when the north pole is oriented toward the sun, that’s our summer, and you can see in this view that we are moving from winter to summer, so the sun would be passing through Aquarius, Pisces, and Aries.

I get better at these, the more of them that we do.  So much of astronomy just comes down to objects in motion, at vast distances, and how things look differently from different perspectives.  It’s a fun subject, and so well suited to 3D animation.

A company called iFIND recently came out with a video clip showing off their new scanning technology.  The technology combines traditional MRI with ultrasound to do the scans in a manner that makes it safe for use with pregnant women and is allowing us a clearer look into the womb than we have had before.  And as you can see, it doesn’t just go all a blur when the fetus moves quickly.

This new technology offers both cutting edge diagnostics, and also a strong collection of 3D data sets that we can continue to learn from about fetal development.  They’re even able to check out the chambers of the baby-to-be’s heart.  This is really cool stuff!

My goodness, it looks like I haven’t updated here for a couple of paintings now.  Well, just now, I finished the 2nd celebrity likeness I’ve ever done.  There is a sad clown with a golden voice, named Puddles, who throws pity parties, and he’s wonderful.  So before going to see him last week, I decided to make a tiny little painting of him and give it to him at the show.  This one took me a few weeks I guess.  I started with the basic lines, and then got to playing with it, and finally had to cut myself off so that I could give it to him.  It was actually really refreshing making a gift this time.  Sometimes I really like doing things like that.

And ultimately, I came out with this…

And then prior to that, I finally finished a piece that I had been working on for months.  This one was called Forces.  It is a bigger canvas, and I had to play with it a lot to get things right.  I like how it ultimately turned out though.

Some of you reading are familiar with using the epmv plugin within Cinema 4D.  Gary Welsh came up with a workflow for rigging those downloaded molecules to make them dynamic.  I haven’t tried this one myself yet, but it looks really cool.  I wanted the reference for myself, so I thought that I would share it with anyone else reading as well.

If you go to the YouTube page directly, you can even download the .c4d file directly.