Hello lungs (day 57)

I took some time today to render the lung model to see if I could get the transparency to work correctly and maybe play around with the video mapping.  I got as far as getting the transparency to work and then ran into a resolution problem.  To my chagrin, Touch Designer will only render to a maximum horizontal resolution of 1280...unless I pay $599 for a commercial license (per machine).  I've asked if they have educational pricing and we'll see.  It's strange that I hadn't notice this before when I rendered to the screen in the lab.  But looking back, it does explain the slightly squished look of the lungs.   Even at the slightly lower resolution, the lungs look pretty good.  I'm really starting to get fond of the shape of the lungs.  They're almost friendly and sweet.  Here is a pic (which is down-res'd):

The grey scale give it a medical X-ray look.  I wanted to keep it neutral until the video is added to see if it has a fluoroscopy look.  We'll see.  Trent is currently working on the texture coordinates.

I also spent some time learning Field which I can run now that I have my Macbook Pro.  It feels like learning a new language even if the component elements (Java, Python, OpenGL) are familiar.  It feels to me like a tool I could seriously love after spending some hours with it.   It reminds me of the old Unix days with lots of command line and immediate feedback.  It also makes me a bit worried that I would write something in Field and a few months later remember nothing of the mental model that led me to a particular design (i.e. more than one way to shoot yourself in the foot).   But this minor worry is not going to stop me.   I'll just trust that I knew what I was doing at the time I wrote the program which, believe it or not, is hard to do.  The belief that I am smarter in the present, so smart in fact that I know better than the previous self who was immersed in the code, is always lurking.

A song for this post.