Thoracosaurus neocesariensis

Thoracosaurus neocesariensis

Friday, January 29, 2010

Look What I Found!!!

Hey hey hey, I was able to dig this bad boy out from the depths of the scanning laptop.


Putting it together went really quick too...I think it's because A.) I am getting much faster at this thing....and B.) There are lots of pointy bits on it that make it really easy to match. Very exciting...because this means that SCAN STITCHING IS COMPLETE!!! Now....as soon as I can figure out how to get all of this geometry to render without crashing any of the 3D packages, I'll be sure to render an image of the complete fossil material. In the meantime it means I need to do a lot of reading so I can start modeling the missing pieces...oh yes, and muscle system research has been going on as well.

Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Closing in On the End of Scan Stitching

So I'm very close to posting an image of the fully digitized fossil material. There are a few pieces that a colleague of mine is finishing up, and I need to locate where the left dentary has run off to... It appears to not be among the files I've been working off of. There's one other place it could be, which is on the laptop that was used when scanning. I hope it's there so I don't have to rescan anything. There is also one dorsal vertebrae that seems to be missing data for about half of the bone....I am going to look into stitching an older scan of that bone together, from when we were using PET opposed to Geomagic. It will take a lot longer to stitch, but It would be better than having to schedule an entirely new scanning session.

In the meantime, here is an image of the skull. The skull was incredibly difficult to stitch together, since each fragment was very difficult to scan. Some of these pieces are being held together by a very thin layer of Paleobond glue. Because of the fragmented quality of the skull, as well as the complex shape in general, it was very difficult to get a complete scan. I worked with what we had and was able to get them pieced together as best I could. The skull is so fragmented though, and a lot of the detail that the scanner didn't pick up consists of the interior of breaks...i.e. material that wouldn't be visible if it was a complete skull. When the full skeleton is built, and the entire skull reconstructed,  it will not even be noticeable that some of these crevices were not picked up.

In the meantime, it's on to digging through the literature so I can start modeling the missing bones.



Monday, January 18, 2010

Large Alligator Motion Reference!

Great day today! Jason Poole and I drove up to Allenwood, PA to visit Clyde Peeling's Reptiland. There were lots of cool things there, and they showed us around a bit behind the scenes of the place (including off-display animals, and the shop where they build all the custom habitats). It's a really cool place and I highly recommend it to anybody interested in zoology. The best part of the day is when we were able to shoot some video footage of their 11.5 foot alligator, Rocky. We had two cameras and were able to capture the large fellow standing up, turning around, and slumping into the water from two different angles. The weight of this guy was very impressive. This should prove to be very helpful for the Thoracosaurus motions, since they are both very large crocodylians (the Thoracosaurus is estimated around 14-17ft long). I also shot some additional footage of the gator's skin for texture reference. The staff was all very friendly and very helpful. Thanks Clyde, Chad, and staff for letting this happen!


Alligator Motion Reference from Evan Boucher on Vimeo.


Also, Many more stitched scans to come later this week...