skull ashtray

The other day a friend had a serious bike accident followed by some CT and MR scans and eventually a brain surgery. He's kind of OK now BTW.

However of course the first thing I had to ask was for his scans. Many were optimized to visualize the cerebral hemorrhage so most of them had his lower jar cut off unfortunately.

But there was this one beautiful scan which made it possible to extract the skull from it with this excellent open source software 3d slicer ( www.slicer.org ). Unfortunately I had to spend several hours in removing that radiant halo around his teeth that was ruining the whole scan. Lead fillings. You better have them removed if you're up for a clean scan!

Anyway, after that I imported the model into blender to reduce the polygon count and apply some mesh fixes (intersecting faces, flipped normals, etc). While I was polygon-deep into the model, I acknowledged the need for some extras. What a coincidence that my friend is a passionate smoker... so there you have