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Welcome to the anatomy3d-blender wiki!
In this wiki will find information about the project scope, repository details, and how to contribute.
It is our dream to be able to allow everyone to be who, and what, they want to be - even if that isn't entirely human. And we don't want that to happen just "some day", we want this to happen within our lifetimes. In order to make our goal of real-life anthropomorphic transformations possible over the next few decades, we must develop (bio)technology to drive a successful transformation. But a transformation into what? Any biotechnology we aim to develop will depend on the precise anatomy of a transformation, and as such it is essential that we have a clear reference of patient's anatomical goals. To do so, we must re-engineer humanoid anatomy.
The human body is a complex machine: every part interacts with each other in unique ways, and even the shape of bones have functional meaning. While we re-engineer it, we must avoid accidentally breaking some of those anatomically relevant shapes. Luckily, we can apply our knowledge of engineering to solve this problem. Just like you would engineer an airplane, we need a proper Computer Aided Design (CAD) tool to be able to re-engineer the human body.
To our surprise, despite the existence of many great Computer Aided Design tools for various different areas of specialization, there exists no good tool to edit animal anatomy on a functional level. As such, we set out to create this tool for ourselves, keeping simplicity in mind. From all CAD and editing tools we examined, Blender quickly came out on top as the framework to base our work on. Although most CAD tools excel at editing manufactured surfaces, Blender excels at editing organic shapes in a user-friendly way, and being open-source with a thriving community, it allows us to extend it to our needs better than most other applications would.
The goal of this project is to create a system that allows users to edit a patient's anatomy while retaining functionally essential shapes, so as to push our ability to make thorough edits while ensure patient safety during a surgical operation or more advanced clinical technique.
Our system is designed to represent anatomy parametrically, in a constraint-based fashion. These geometric constraints (not to be confused with Blender's object-level constraints) act as modifiers for joint, bone, muscle, and skin geometry. For example, the upper arm bone (humerus) is represented as an arbitrarily shaped rod, whose shape is then constrained by the fact that it must be able to hinge at the elbow, rotate around the shoulder, and form the anchor points to various muscles. These constraints limit what shape the bone can really take, and it so turns out that applying these constraints on an arbitrary rod faithfully reconstruct the shape of the humerus as it occurs in nature.
The reason to take a constraint-based approach is simple: any parameter or part of the bone that remains unconstrained is a parameter that the user should be allowed to change arbitrarily. After all, changing those parameters are guaranteed to have no functional effect on the bone. Even the constraint parameters can be edited to allow for predictable changes to occur. This way, the user knows exactly what the impact is of any change they make to a patient's anatomy, without guesswork required.