Freelance Work – Active Medical Training

I’ve recently finished a freelance work for a company called Active Medical Training, based in Georgia. I was contacted by email about the piece I have posted on my website about how to apply a tourniquet, done in line work. The interest was the company had a tactical emergency kit with medical supplies and they needed illustrations to go along with each product on their use. There were 11 products, and each had between 3-7 steps. The major kicker was the time I was given to create the illustrations. At first the deadline was only a few days after initial contact, but thankfully it was extended to allow me two weeks to finish. And I needed every available moment I could take; it took the entire two weeks to make all the illustrations, send off for revisions, make revisions, and send off again. I also had to design and arrange them into several layouts for their final placement in the emergency kit.

I was sent product descriptions and quick sketches on each of their steps, and I also found images of the products online and used my own hands for reference. All of the illustrations were done in Illustrator.

As the work was for-hire, I do not own any copyrights and cannot post images of the illustrations. I am OK with that though for this particular work. The images are being used for a good cause, I made them specifically for their purpose, and I didn’t put into them the emotional attachment I would have in most of my pieces. However, given the time I spent putting into it, I was quite honestly underpaid. At first I was asked to give an hourly rate based on a sample I gave them of one of the products. The rate I gave was extremely low, considering I have a graduate degree in the subject. But ultimately it was said that there was a limited budget and I would be paid based on that, with half up front and the rest after completion.

I do appreciate the opportunity and the experience, though. And I was told by the company that I’d be contacted again for future works, so maybe I’m starting to build a small clientele.

Alya Red: A computational heart

 

It’s certainly been a while since I’ve posted anything here. All of the works I’ve done since graduating have been for my jobs at Body Scientific and UIC, and I cannot post any of them here yet.

Came across this article today, however, and thought I’d share it. Winners of the 2013 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge. The video about Alya Red is particularly interesting.

Finished Graduate Thesis

I presented my graduate project today. Overall I think it went pretty well. I of course had some technical issues right from the start, I didn’t have the right adapter to connect my own PC to the television we use to show presentations, so I had to borrow a Mac that had the right port. So I also had to quickly republish my project to use on a Mac OS, thankfully the publishing only takes a couple minutes. But then a few minutes into the presentation the television shut off, and then a few minutes after that the battery on the Mac died, and so I had to transfer all of my files to another Mac instead of waiting for the dead one to restart. But otherwise I got through the presentation pretty smoothly, and I think I managed to speak for at least 30 minutes. I was conscientiously trying to talk slower and pause before clicking to the next slide. The application itself worked fine too, all the buttons and interactivity worked how they were supposed to. Afterwards there was some good discussion among the crowd about how my project could be effective, and just the overall impact of pelvic floor disorders. There’s still some revisions to be done, one local staff member who specializes in pelvic floor education and sat in on the presentation said the interactive was a good starting board. But in general, it went well and I’m glad to be done.

Graduate Project. Done. (Almost.)

On Monday I finished my graduate project.  Barring any edits I’ll have to make once I give the presentation, and I’m sure there will be quite a bit of editing, my pelvic floor interactive is published as both a desktop application and a webplayer.  I spent an extra semester this summer in order to finish it, taking more project research hours and an independent study to get help with Unity, the program that uses JavaScript to create the interactivity and the final publish.  Before this project I had no idea what Unity even was, and certainly had no JavaScript experience.  But I got a good amount of assistance from one of the professors in the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at UIC with the JavaScript.

I’m waiting for approval for my paper from my research committee so I can schedule my presentation for July 19.

I’ve put the interactive as an external link on my website, laurenhamm.com.  Because of the compression quality for the web, the text in the information scene is fuzzy, but overall works well.

I’m pretty satisfied with the project as a whole, though there are some things I would change if I had more time, or if I had the mental energy to devote more effort into redoing it.  I’ll be glad when I’ll be completely done with it.  Though I do plan on giving it to a local pelvic floor clinic, so I’m sure I’ll be redoing parts of it so it is acceptable for public use.

Award Winning Shot of Human Brain

It looks like a bunch of worms, which I think is really gross, but this is also a really cool photo.

Female Breast Anatomy

Sculpted in ZBrush using ZSpheres, exported into Photoshop to add color.

Unity

Finally finally finally starting to look into using Unity.  I’ve watched a couple introductory videos to get used to the interface, and made a practice project and scene with shapes to get used to importing from Maya.  Well I’ve just imported the pelvis from my research, and THANKFULLY it went in fine.  I was worried the mesh would be too dense and I’d have to remake it.  Only issue so far, and it’s actually an important one, is that the texture maps have transparency attributes.  I didn’t instruct the exported files from Mudbox to have transparency, though they are .png files.  I broke the transparency connection in the file in Maya before I exported, but it’s still there.  I’m thinking I should hopefully just have to re-export the textures from Mudbox as a different file type and it will work.

In order to bring in the rest of my objects I’m going to have to sit myself down in the BVIS computer lab for a while.  I have blend shapes, and Unity alone doesn’t handle those, so I need to use the Mega-Fiers plugin that the lab computers have.  I also need to add lights, camera positions, labels, and interactivity.  I want the models to be able to be user-rotated and animation stop/start, as well as maybe the ability to hide the organs so the muscles can be seen from inside.

Update: I re-exported the image files from Mudbox as jpegs and there is no longer any transparency issues, but now the files are of low quality.  There is only an 8-bit option, and Maya wasn’t liking the tiff versions.

ZBrush Final

Finally getting around to working on my final assignment for my ZBrush independent study.  I’ve decided to create the inner anatomy of the breast.  I had intended to create render passes and color, and time permitting I will.  So far I have just the basic sculpt of the torso created using zspheres; I’ll begin adding the inner anatomical details soon.

More Project Progress

I’m currently taking what advantage I can of spring break and using a couple computers in the lab to render parts of my final Maya project.  Here’s a couple of shots of what most of the final imaging will look like; I still have to render (one by one by hand) the particles that this blobby thing will be emitting and composite them in post production.

I’ve also been making more changes to my pelvis project, and I’m planning on very soon to be bringing the models into Unity.

Progress Updates

Just a couple screenshots of what I’ve been working on.  I’m reworking my final Maya project from last semester by making it into a longer animation and adding an extra character that I am currently creating.  That extra character is turning out to be a floating, glowy blobby thing.  I was going to add wings, but I’ve realized that to do that with this object would be far too much hassle than I have remaining time for.  The other shots are of the uterine prolapse I created for my research project.