Australopithecus afarensis - forensic facial reconstruction

The Australopithecus afarensis was an hominid that lived between 4 and 2 millions of years past.

They had biped behavior and the appearence of apes.

 

In this post I'll talk about my little adventure to reconstruct the face of this specie. 

This work is a type of continuation of Taung Project, because the knowledge used there was tapped here, with some increase of the technic.

I have to thank to Moacir Elias Santos, a Brazilian archaeologist that took a serie of pictures of a cast skull on Museu Egipcio e Rosacruz.

 The skull used was reconstructed with PPT GUI (scanning by picture).

 

 

To increase the quality of the reconstruction, I used a CT-Scan of a chimpanzee.

 

 

 The skull of chimp was deformed using Lattice modifier on Blender 3D, until match with the Australopithecus skull. Obviously, the skin was deformed too.

 

After this, I used the reference of the deformed skin to modeling the final face.

 

  The following steps were the same explained in other posts.

I hope you enjoyed.

A big hug!

From Youtube to Blender: Forensic facial reconstruction of a child mummy

This post is about a practical application of a serie of studies published here in this blog.

After I started to study about forensic facial reconstruction I saw that is much more easy to find videos of CT-Scan than the DICOM files and other tomography formats.

A way to convert a video in a reconstructed mesh was described here.

Some days ago I was reading about mummies (desperate to find a CT-Scan) and I found this post:

http://erl.wustl.edu/research/imseg/mummy.html

It talks about a child mummy of St. Louis, that lived in a range of 40 BC and 130 AD. He died with 7 or 8 months.

Inside the matter had a video with some seconds of a CT-Scan slicing. I was able to convert it in a reconstructed mesh, and after I found a video on Youtbe with more qualty and I used it to make the final mesh, used in this post.

I downloaded the video with Videodownload Helper (Firefox) and it was converted in a image sequence and after in a serie of DICOM files.

Unfortunately I lost the original vetorial file and now we have only the infographic in Portuguese version, like you can see below (but it have a lot of images, that dispensing you to read it).

To make a reconstruction with historical and archaeological foundation I had the help of Moacir Elias Santos, archaeologist of the Egypt Museum and Rosacruz, from Brazil.

The animated gif above shows the extracted frames of the animation converted into a CT-Scan. I reduced the slices to make it more didatic.

I had a serie of dificulties to find landmarks to use on the child's face, cause appear that it doesn't exist. So I use a average of 3-8 year and rescale it to have at least a reference.

I use a serie of babies pictures to draw the line of the neck and ears.

Moacir sent me a compose image with the original mummy, that you can see below.

I hope you enjoy this post. I see you in the next. A big hug!

Forensic Facial Reconstruction of Virtual Mummy (1997)

Indeed, according the Virtual Mummy's official site, the CT-Scan was made in 1991, so it have more than twenty years! 

I choosed the year of 1997 because it was the creation of Virtual Mummy, a project where some researchers of University of Hamburg-Eppendorf shared a couple of interactive .MOV files used to reconstruct this mummy.

The original project can be visited here: http://www.voxel-man.de/gallery/virtual_mummy/

The links of the interactive movies can be viewed here: http://www.voxel-man.de/gallery/virtual_mummy/scenes.html

I was not able to find a lot information about the mummy. Only that she was 30 years old when died, more than 2300 years ago.

I would like to register the power of Blender's video editor to select the area of interest and isolate it.

In this case, the little area of the CT-Scan.

Even with the little dimensions of the CT-Scan I was able to get a good quality of 3D reconstruction using IMG2DCM and InVesalius.

To put the model in the right proportions, I used the images inside this article: http://www.uke.de/institute/medizinische-informatik/downloads/institut-medizinische-informatik/pommert-mc1991.pdf

With the skull in my hands, the reconstruction was done.

I hope it can be useful and enjoyable for you, like was to me.

A big hug and I see you in the next article!