How to Design a Tooth Library
Several of colleagues have contributed to the tooth library over the last few years.
- In early 2011, Scott (USA) from Dental Lab Network provided me with some scanned STL files of teeth.
They were medium detail and all triangle meshes, but they were enough to get started on.
- In March 2011, Armin Kirsten (DE) and I collaborated on designing the all-quadrilateral base meshes based on those teeth. I recently reviewed our emails and we exchanged over 60 emails over several months while learning about mesh topology and assigning the quads to the tooth forms. Here are some of the annotated images we shared while designing the topology.
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June 2011 the base meshes were finished. I shared the base library and some blender sculpting tutorials and asked people to submit their sculpts on the base meshes to the project.
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July 2011, Armin provided "tooth_library_sculpt_ak1.blend" in which he sculpted the detail and shapes for what became the library which came standard with the addon until 2017.
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June 2011, Mario Panisisidi (ITA) provided scanned partial library. I adapted it to the standard topology of the library, but never distributed it because it only had some teeth.
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June 2011 MarKo Jeselisjevic (SER) sculpted a nice anterior library, and also applied textures to them
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December 2013 Christian Brenes (CR->USA) sculpted a full library and did some really nice texture work with them as well. The "brenes_library" was included for a short time with the standard addon but removed to save space
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2016 to Present Guido Santandrea (ITA) and Marcos Graf (BRA) have been working on the intercuspation, occlsual relationships and overall form of the library.
A truly international Project!
##Convenience Scrips
Sometimes while working on a library, artists/users will rename teeth to help them keep track of different version or adjustemnts they have made. When it's time to make the final library, all the teeth should have a name representing their tooth number in the International System.
'import bpy C = bpy.context for ob in C.selected_objects: if len(ob.name) > 2: ob.name = ob.name[0:2]'
import bpy
C = bpy.context
for ob in C.selected_objects:
if len(ob.constraints):
mx = ob.matrix_world.copy()
for c in ob.constraints:
ob.constraints.remove(ob.constraints[c.name])
`ob.matrix_world = mx`
`ob.update_tag()`