Darcy's mysteries

After I reconstructed a face of a skeleton called Joaquim, placed in Medicine History Museum (MUHM),  I was invited to do other job for a skull that belonged to the same donator.

When I traveled to Porto Alegre to talk in a conference (FISL 14), I took the opportunity to know Joaquim, do a TV interview, and see the other skull.

In the first view I didn't see anything different on the structure of the skull. I took it in my hands to a room and I took some photos and make a 3D scanning.

I took pictures from top and bottom to make a complete 3D scanning with PPT-GUI.

When I saw the skull, I imagined that it belonged to a woman. To have more safety I sent the 3D mesh to Dr. Paulo Miamoto, a forensic specialist to make a report about the sex of the individual.

To my surprise, the report was inconclusive. The protocol have a range o 1 to 5. 1 is a lot woman, and 5 is a lot man, the result was 2,4!

We take the opinion of other specialists and a half told that was a woman, a half that was a man.

Because this ambiguity, we starts to call the skull with a Portuguese neutral name: Darcy.

This was one of the misteries, the other appeared during the 3D modeling.

In the video above we have the process of the reconstruction. Apparently it doesn't hane anithyng different with the shape of the face.

When I put the skin, I noted that in the area of the top of the head I had to decrease the volume a lot.

When we see the two mesh side-by-side, Joaquim (an little man at left) and Darcy (at right), we can see a notorious difference at the top of the head.

The skull was submitted to a neurologist to be analyzed.

I don't have any knowledge not even for speculate about the result. We have to wait.

I hope you enjoy.

A big hug and see you in the next!

A skeleton of Medicine's History Museum have his face revealed

Some days ago I was looking for some skull to reconstruct and present in my talk on Blender in Brazil. The talk will happen in the FISL14, one of the greatest free software conference in the world.

Fortunately I received an email from the Medicine's History Museum of Rio Grande do Sul (MUHM), that needed a forensic facial reconstrucion.

The nickname of the skeleton is Joaquim. He was a prisoner that died like a indigent in France in 1920. In 2006 he was donated to the museum by a family of doctors.

I ordered a CT-Scan and the people of the museum sent me not only the head, but all Joaquim's body.

So, I'll reconstruct all the body, but for now only the head was done.

To reconstruct the bones in 3D I used InVesalius, a CT-Scan reader open source. It was necessary export some files with different configurations, because the amount of data is huge.

Like I said, in this first part of Joaquim Project I'll reconstruct only the face. In the Meshlab I cleaned the noise of 3D reconstruction of CT-Scan.

The skull was not complete. To get the mandible I made a projection using Sassouni/Krogman method shown in Karen T. Taylor's book.

With the help of forensic dentist Dr. Paulo Miamoto, we get the range of Joaquim's age: 30-50.

The tissue depth markers was put.

So it was possible to sketch the profile of the face.

 

 The muscles was glued at the skull.

 

 Finally, the skin, the cloth and the hair was put.

I don't know if Joaquim really was born in France, but he appear a French man.

Thanks to:
Éverton Quevedo and Letícia Castro from MUHM.

A big hug and I see you in the next!

The Faces of Evolution - Exhibition of hominids forensic facial reconstructions

May 18th through July 31st, 2013 will happen in the big and beautiful Curitiba city in Brazil, the exhibition The Faces of Evolution.

Near the replicas of skull of hominids will have nine panels with forensic facial reconstructions.

The exhibition will happen now, but the history started here in ATOR some months ago.

The methodology developed to model the majority of the faces was used for the very first time in Alberto di Trento's reconstruction.

On that occasion the Arc-Team presented a paper at the event Giovani Antropology (Italy), where they described the methodology for forensic facial reconstruction using only free software.

Following the events, we initiated Project Taung. If before we had rebuilt a modern human this time we would rebuild a hominid remote, then the Taung Child.

Beyond the Arc-Team Group, has joined the project Prof. Dr. Nicola Carrara University of Padua.

We were able to reconstruct the face of the Taung child fastly, thanks to a methodology developed previously.

We had a largely positive feedback, both personalities linked to forensic facial reconstruction, as those related to 3D modeling, as the creator of  Blender, Mr. Ton Roosendaal.

Several media outlets broadcasted stories (see the comments) on the reconstruction of the Taung child, as the Jornal de Brasilia above.

After the successful reconstruction of hominid remote, we got in touch with the archaeologist Prof. Dr. Moacir Elias Santos of the Archaeological Museum of Ponta Grossa and Prof. Esp. Vivian Tedardi of Rosicrucian and Egyptian Museum in Brazil and we began a series of modeling which culminated in the exhibition the Faces of Evolution, described here.

The Australopithecus afarensis.

The Homo erectus pekinensis.

The Cro-Magnon man.

The Turkana Boy.

The Homo heildelbergensis.

The Homo neanderthalensis.

The Homo habilis.

And last but not least, the Homo floresiensis.


This was a brief description of the exhibition and its history. Now, we expect the event date arrives, while others look for fossils to be rebuilt.

A big hug!

Homo floresiensis - 3D forensic facial reconstruction of the "hobbit"

Second Wikipedia:

Homo floresiensis ("Flores Man", nicknamed "hobbit" and "Flo") is a possible species, now extinct, in the genus Homo. The remains of an individual were discovered in 2003 on the island of Flores in Indonesia. Partial skeletons of nine individuals have been recovered, including one complete cranium (skull).These remains have been the subject of intense research to determine whether they represent a species distinct from modern humans, and the progress of this scientific controversy has been closely followed by the news media at large. This hominin is remarkable for its small body and brain and for its survival until relatively recent times (possibly as recently as 12,000 years ago).

Some months ago a forensic facial reconstruction of the "hobbit" was presented in the web.

I liked very much of this and decided create a version to a exposure about human evolution that will happen here in Brazil.

I was not able to find a 3D reconstructed skull on the web, but fortunately I found two ortogonal rotating video in this link: www-personal.une.edu.au/~pbrown3/ (thank you mr. Peter Brown!)

To reconstruct the skull I converted the videos in a image sequence with FFMPEG:

$ ffmpeg -i Input_video.avi -sameq Output_directory/%04d.jpg

After that I imported ten images in Inkscape and I converted the bitmap in vector (Shift + Alt +B).

So, I placed the "slices" in their positions, and I made a extrusion by rotating.

With this I had the basic shape of the skull to continue, this time, with the sculpting process.

If you wanna see the entire process, please look this album: http://plus.google.com/photos/115430171389306289690/albums/5853884703716365057

If you wanna download the .ply file, visit this link:

http://www.4shared.com/zip/4OEXhGKo/3D_scan_4_EXPORT_Homo_floresen.html

I cannot forget to thank Dr. Paulo Miamoto to help me with the modeling of the teeth.

I hope you enjoy.

A big hug and I see you in the next!

More info about the archaeological automatic drawing technique

Yesterday I was looking the statistics regarding this blog and I noticed that one of the most popular post is the one about the automatic drawing technique we (Alessandro Bezzi, Simone Cavalieri and me) proposed some years ago. I noticed as well that i forgot to upload in Arc-Team's open library the presentation we did in Foggia (for ArcheoFOSS 5) about this argument (sorry, just in Italian by now...). Now the link is active and you can download the presentation here, or in Academia.edu.
As the slides are in Italian I summarize here the experiment we did in that occasion. We divided archaeological finds in four classes, looking which kind of documentation normally they need.

1) photographic documentation (e.g coins)
2) simple drawing (e.g. flint)
3) drawing + shading (e.g. normal artefacts)
4) drawing + shading + section (e.g. pottery)


Then we developed a five steps techniques to get the appropriate documentation for each class in a automatic or semi-automatic way (using only FLOSS, of course):

1. rectified photo (GRASS - efoto)
2. rectified photo + vector drawing (GRASS - efoto -OpenJUMP)
3. rectified photo + vector drawing + shading (GRASS - efoto -OpenJUMP - stippler -  Inkscape)
4. rectified photo + vector drawing + shading + section (GRASS - efoto -OpenJUMP - stippler - Inkscape - hardware)

Here is an image with the original picture of the archaeological finds we used as test and the final layout.

All the finds come from the excavation in the church of S. Andrea in Storo (TN - Italy) and gave us positive results (I just used to many points in stippler for the drawing of the pottery... anyway it is now easy to change this parameter with the new python interface Alessandro developed).

In the slides you will also find our first test on Lena picture:

The image has nothing to do with sexism, she is just o kind of standard since 70's for raster images tests... by the way she is beautiful :)

2016-04-28 Post updated

In 2010 we wrote an article (in Italian) about this technique:

"Proposta per un metodo informatizzato di disegno archeologico" (here in ResearchGate and here in Academia).