Hacker News Reader

Comment by mhalle | Hacker News Reader

The title is not correct, it should be:

The first open source 3D atlas of human anatomy in Blender.

There have been a variety of open source human anatomy atlases, though few of the entire human body. Not to take away from the great work that has gone into Z-Anatomy or the underlying data from the BodyParts3D project in Japan. The BodyParts3D data is licensed Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.1.

Disclaimer: I am the PI for the Open Anatomy project (https://openanatomy.org), which is working to build open source anatomy atlases for worldwide use. We also have an anatomy term viewer https://ta2viewer.openanatomy.org that uses the same nomenclature that Z-Anatomy uses, and which is linked from many Wikipedia anatomy articles.

[Edited to add the bp3d license.]

View on HN

The "Blender" part is important though.

I have just downloaded the Z-Anatomy atlas in Blender format and I have opened it in Blender, on a Linux system.

It appears to work fine and it is usable even without the viewing application that is provided only for Android and Windows.

In the past I have used directly BodyParts3D, which is a great collection of 3D models and which remains very useful, as the models of various organs are easy to import in any 3D application.

This complete Blender model should be more convenient for exploring the whole body or for retargetting some captured motion on it to create an animated sequence where the internal movements of various organs are displayed, e.g. of muscles and bones.

Edit:

When I have looked for the first time at openanatomy.org, I have browsed too quickly and my initial impression was that the atlases can be viewed only online, in which case they would have been useless for me.

Looking a second time more carefully, I have seen that the atlases can also be downloaded and viewed with the free program 3D Slicer.

To test how it works, I have downloaded and installed 3D Slicer on a Linux system and I have also downloaded from Github one of the atlases of openanatomy.org, the brain atlas.

The atlas can be viewed without problems with 3D Slicer.

For some purposes the atlases from openanatomy.org may be more detailed, but the Z-Anatomy atlas offers complementary benefits as a whole body atlas that should be also easy to animate.

Ok, we've put it in Blender above. Thanks!

Edit: actually, I think it's better to take out "The First" instead. The Blender part is in the domain name.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com