Tuesday 12 March 2013

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:


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!


No comments:

Post a Comment

BlogItalia - La directory italiana dei blog Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.