Facial reconstruction of a Neanderthal

I already reconstructed some faces using skull of ancient people, but I always had the tissue depth of modern measurements to help me make this.

This time I choosed reconstruct a neanderthal man, using only the facial musculature how reference.

I used the coordinates of Manchester method shown in Caroline Wilkinson's book called "Forensic Facial Reconstruction". But, like I wrote, I haven't used the tissue depth markers. The reason is obvious... It's impossible to obtain this data, because we don't have any Homo neanderthalensis alive.

The Process

I tried to find some CT-scan of a neanderthal Skull, but I found only one. And it was not compatible with my software: http://foveaproject.free.fr/availableDataFossilEng.html

I tested more than twenty CT-scan software to convert the INR file in a mesh. Unfortunatelly I didn't get this time.

After I tried to use SfM to reconstruct using sequence of images, videos and other ways. But all in vain, like you can see in my attempts album: https://picasaweb.google.com/115430171389306289690/NeanderthalAttemp1

To obtain a answer about CT-Scan I sent more than thirty e-mails to scientists, students and institutes asking about neanderthal skulls. But no one could help me.

In vain, I spent a lot of days trying , until deduce that I should to model the skull from scratch, even this being not the most accurate way to obtain the data.

First of all, I found a good skull references here: http://www.indiana.edu/~ensiweb/lessons/skulls2.html

So, the skull was modelled in Blender.

After, the muscles was placed, using a technology called metabals.

The skin over the muscles.

Obs.: Note that I put the eyes with blue color. My friend called Moacir Elias Santos, a brazilian archaeologist told me that the blue eyes is a genetic mutation that has not happened with Neanderthals, like you can see in these articles (thanks Moacir!):
http://occupycorporatism.com/
blue-eyes-originated-10000-years-ago-in-the-black-sea-region/

http://newswatch.
nationalgeographic.com/2008/09/17/neanderthal_woman_is_first_rep/

The UV Mapping (texturing).

The first rendering... with right eye color.

The hair setup.

And the final results.

All the modelling was made with free software. I used:

Blender to model
Gimp to help with the textures
Inkscape to organize the references
All running under Linux Ubuntu.

I gave a image to Wikipedia, like you can see in these links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal_anatomy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal

The process was fun. The main goal was modelling all in a few hours with quality and precision... at least the possible precision.


I need to thank the Arc-Team for motivating me to write this article with my bad English.

I hope you enjoyed it. A big hug and see you the next article.

Software recovery: e-foto rectification module for 64 bit

As you can see from this mail (ArcheOS developer mailing list), since July 2011 one of the problem in mainatinnig ArcheOS e-foto package was related with the rectification module of this software. In fact this module seems to be abbandoned in the latest releases. Unfortunatly this code is very important for our archaeological field-work, being connected with the Metodo Aramus (the procedure we use to obtain georeferencad photomosaics).

e-foto's rectification module at work (Metodo Aramus)

For this reason I fisrt tried to contact the software developers (in the official forum) and then, having too few time to dedicate to this problem (I know, my fault...), I decide to upload the code on github at this link: https://github.com/archeos/rectify. This solution should help to keep the rectification module of e-foto ("rectify") an active project as a stand-alone application, avoiding the risk to become an abbandonware.

However, looking to the development of ArcheOS new release (codename Theodoric), there was still a big problem: I was not able to compile "rectify" with Qt4 also for 64 bit, as ArcheOS 5 should have both a 32 and a 64 bit version.

To solve this situation I asked again the help of the community, writing a post in the italian Qt forum. As you can see from the discussion (sorry, just italian) an user (Tom) helped me in updating the source code. It was necessary to modify just two files: matriz.cpp and matriz.h, so I did a new commit on github and now the code is ready to be compiled with Qt4. I did not yet packaged rectify for 64 bit, but I will do it ASAP. Anyway if someone has this kind of machine and needs to compile the module, he can use the source-code in github (It should work, but if there are problems please report them).

I hope it was usefull.

Ciao.

The commit in the source code (Github)

ArcheOS v.4 (Caesar) beta release presented during the ArcheoFOSS VII

Hi,

with a big delay I uploaded the slides of the official presentation of ArcheOS 4 (Caesar) beta release, during the ArcheoFOSS VII, which took place in Rome (23 and 23 June 2012). The file can be seen here (Academia) or here (Researchgate).

With our contribute we tried to satisfy the scientific committee guidlines, illustrating not only the new software integrated in ArcheOS, but also the archaeological methodology connected with the system. We also presented some projects in which ArcheOS has been used, the community feedbacks and a preview of the future developments.

I would like to thank both Roberto Angeletti (aka BobMax) and Alessandro Furieri (SpatiaLite) for the fruitful discussions in Rome.

Master UNESCO Open Téchne: Open Source technologies for Cultural Heritage

In 2013 will start the first UNESCO master "Open Techne" (Open Source technologies for Cultural Heritage). The master is organized by the Istituto di Formazione e Ricerca della Federazione Italiana Club e Centri UNESCO e il Centro di GeoTecnologie (CGT) dell’Università degli Studi di Siena, with the aim to train professionals capable of using innovative open source technologies in the investigation and exploitation of Cultural Heritage. The registrations to the master are open until December 15, 2012.
More info are available on the official webpage: http://www.istitutoficlu.org/open-archaeo/.

We (Arc-Team) will partecipate to the master, teaching the use of FLOSS in archaeology and focusing the attention on ArcheOS. It will be also a nice opportunity to work together with Luca Mandolesi (adArte) and Enzo Cocca (CGT), developers of pyArchInit, to try to better integrate their tool in a specific deb package (untill now we added pyArchInit into an experimental ArcheOS package together with CADtools and BobMax's VTP extensions for QGIS).

July 27, 2011 - July 27, 2012: a year of ATOR

Hello all,

today ATOR reaches its first year, so I thought to post and analyze some statistics to see how this experiment of shared research is progressing.

Until now we have six active authors, who wrote 79 posts. The community reacted with 96 comments, although most of them are written by the authors in response to direct questions from readers. Overall the blog counted 21484 visits (8695 visits since the activation of the Revolver Maps plugin, as you can see in the image below).

Today ATOR has 25 members and the general trend is still growing, but sinlge posts may affect the statistics with an increase of visitors related both to the quality of the post and to the interest aroused by the topic. A good example of this situation is the post of Cicero Moraes about forensic facial reconstruction, which has captured the attention of the community of 3D modelers and of physical anthropologists, reching the peak traffic you can see in June 2012 in the graph below.

The post reached also the attention of Ton Roosendaal (original creator of Blender), who wrote a tweet about it:

Anyway, the main strength of ATOR and of an open approach to research remains the active collaboration between researchers operating in different fields (not only archaeologists). In this case must be placed, for example, the new collaborations with the 3D artist Cicero Moraes (already mentioned) and with the anthropologist Moreno Tiziani, creator of anthropological association Antrocom Onlus, which publishes the Online Journal of Anthropology. 
We will go on working with this open philosopy in archaeology, inspired by the Free/Libre and Open Source Software movement, and to further increase the quality of posts in ATOR with the help of the community. As usual, if you want to collaborate, just contact us! 
Thank you. 

3D PDF skull restored

Hi,
today I review the post 3D PDF for archaeology, which had a broken link to the PDF file. The link is now restored (I took the time to check the data). If you download the PDF file and open it with Adobe Acrobat Reader 9 (we still did not find an open source pdf reader able to visualiza u3d data), this is what you should see:

Sorry for the slow clip, but I had to virtualize Windows in ArcheOS (within Virtual Box) and the u3d file of the skull is too heavy to create a light 3D PDF file (it was just a first test).
I would like to thank the people who noticed the broken link. Their report was very helpful in reviewing ATOR old posts! 

New tutorial on Python Photogrammetry Toolbox: check camera database

Hi all,
i uploaded a new tutorial on Python Photogrammetry Toolbox. It is available here. It shows how to insert a new camera image sensor (CCD width) into the Camera's Database of PPT.

This is needed to elaborate pictures of a new digital camera. Look this tutorial to go on with the elaboration of the images.