Rodin Hands

So, The Cantor Arts Center, one of the museums at Stanford, has a wonderfully fantastic collection of Rodin sculptures, including:

"The Thinker"

"The Gates of Hell"

and "The Burghers of Calais." 

 Admission into the museum is free, happily enough.


We, however, are going to be working with the Rodin Hands.

Not as well known, but supremely interesting.  One of the professors here at Stanford even uses the hands as a way of teaching, as 5 out of the 8 hands display a pathological condition.

A sneak peak into (one of the things) we are doing here at Stanford- Rodin in 3D. I have been working on fitting a model from a segmented data set containing broken metacarpals.  Fairly severely broken metacarpals, even.  However, I am jumping ahead of myself.

The Stanford Clinical Anatomy department has been working on getting the hands laser scanned and converted into 3D models.  This is where I come in.

While I can't really show images of the project in progress, rest assured that it's a lot a fun.  Leslie White and I are working on the hands together.  We're having to fill in the 3D models where the laser scanning technology didn't pick up the surface.  Holes, sometimes giant holes, were left in the models.  These need to be filled in carefully, keeping as true to the original surface as possible.  I will be heading over to the Cantor Arts Center tomorrow to take more reference photos for this process.

Afterwards, we will be superimposing pathological anatomy, the same types of conditions the hands express, into the scans.  I just finished putting the shattered metacarpal scan into one of the hands this afternoon.

We have a crack team of interns that have been working on segmenting out the metacarpal data from a CT scan.  With a little bit of clean up in Amira from yours truly, it was ready to be exported as individual bones, rigged in Maya,

and repositioned into the Rodin hand scan.  An interesting process, to be sure.  Next, our crack team will be working on retopo'ing the hands themselves so they can be used in a real-time environment.  It's going to be awesome.  They are going to be learning 3D Coat to do the retopo'ing process.

In any case, I can't wait to see where this project is headed.  It looks to be a great start, and I can't say how excited I have been to be involved!