Re: Re: calling all uber geeks

Sam,

That's the progam I couldn't think of!! I used that to build 3D models out of data from a scanning microscope, that ended up on a CD-ROM called 'Images from the Edge" - boy, oh boy do I ever miss the somewhat whimsical days of university research - and I mean whimsical in the best possible way - ie, no clients calling you at the 11th hour wanting things re-done or else their entire marketing campaign will go belly up :-)

I think I need a sabbatical from work to go back and muck around with all the things I did as grad student - I wonder how fast the G5 is compared to the old quadra 900 I had then :-)

Dwayne

----- Original Message -----
From: Sam Wang <stwang1@bellsouth.net>
Date: Tuesday, April 20, 2004 7:20 pm
Subject: Re: Re: calling all uber geeks

> Hi Dwayne,
>
> I played with the generation of 3D from greyscale as well, way back
> then. The software I used was NIH
> Image, a freebie written by Wayne Rasband of the National Institute
> of Health. It was used
 by scientists
> all over the globe in processing images. Though not having been
> updated for a while, it is still very
> useful and can be freely downloaded from:
> http://rsb.info.nih.gov/nih-image/
>
> It can't replace Photoshop since it's primarily an 8 bit image
> processor, but I can guarantee that you
> loads of fun, plus perhaps an insight on why medical images look
> the way they do. Besides generating
> great looking 3D pictures of greyscale graphics, it also has a very
> cool histogram feature - it makes
> histogram of any straight line that you draw. So, a student of mine
> wrote a macro and saved slices of
> such histogram and made a 3D photo-sculpture out of them.
> Unfortunately he had to cut the pieces by
> hand, but that was gosh a long long time ago, when monitors showed
> just black and white pixels...
>
> Sam
>
> >
> > From: DWAYNE SANDALL <sandall@shaw.ca>
> > Date: 2004/04/20 Tue AM 11:20:48 EDT
> > To: alt-photo-process-l@sask.us
ask.ca
> > Subject: Re: calling all uber geeks
> >
> > Barry,
> >
> > Here's my thinking on this, along with a couple of questions.
> First, the questions, if I recall correctly,
> an stl file is a 3D file, and if that is correct, then what I am
> guessing you want to do is make a 'textured'
> surface print? The rest of my comments are based on this
> assumption, of making this textured print.
> >
> > I think the answer you are looking for in this case might be in
> the realm of terrain mapping. When I
> was in architecture school in the early/mid 90's I would take arial
> or sattelite images and be able to
> make a 3D terrain model into which I could insert my 3D model of
> the building.
> >
> > Here's a bit of the theory of how it worked. The arial photos
> would be in greyscale, adjusted so that
> pure white was the highest point of the ground, and pure black
> would be lowest, and the shades of
> grey would be somewhere in between. The software would int
erpolate
> the pixels and build a 'mesh' that
> would approximate the surface.
> >
> > Although the only time I made any physical 3D
> > prototype was of a building model, and it was pretty cool to see
> something come out of the screen
> into a piece of platic.
> >
> > Once, late at night in the school's computer lab, for kicks, I
> had taken a photo of my face and made a
> mesh out of it.. it was pretty weird looking, but then again, some
> say I am too :-)
> >
> > As for software, I am a bit out of touch in this realm, as I last
> did anything like this in the late 90's,
> but being the pack-rat that I am, I probably have some of the
> software backed up that I could refer to
> and point you in the right direction.
> >
> > I hope this helps,
> > Dwayne
>
>
>
Received on Wed Apr 21 09:07:53 2004