#so many layers where it's like you might have different technicalities and outward projections but you both end up-

[windrunner]

more of it

more of them ft. my two favorite designs for this flag like i cannot pick they are both so tasty....

rotating them in my mind they suck so bad and i want to hit them with my car but i well and truly am like. okay. yeah. this makes sense in my brain. it was revealed 2 me in a dream type truth

my derangement

not even projecting too hard i just think both of them are like this fr

^^^ my evil and horrible guygals (heart emojis flying around my head) ^^

[felassan]

New article from IGN: 'How Dragon Age: The Veilguard Used Lessons From The Sims to Craft Its Character Creator and More'

Inside the intricate systems that bring BioWare's RPG to life.

"Corinne Busche wasn’t looking for a job when she sat down for lunch with BioWare’s leadership team in 2019. She had been a fan of BioWare’s games since the days of Dragon Age: Origins, and she wanted to, in her words, “meet my heroes.” “So I went to lunch with a couple of folks in the leadership team at BioWare, and we started riffing about progression systems and skill trees and economies, and we just really resonated with one another,” Busche remembers. “And much to my surprise, they expressed an interest in me joining, and it was kind of the question you don't have to ask me twice. That was such a dream opportunity, and to be able to step in this space, visit the studio, see my favorite characters on display throughout the walls, I was immediately sold. Immediately.” Busche was coming off a stint at Maxis, where she helped design the systems on various The Sims projects. In taking the helm of Dragon Age: The Veilguard, she became part of a wider talent pipeline flowing from Maxis to other parts of the games industry. It’s a pipeline that includes the likes of Eric Holmberg-Weidler, who was credited with fine-tuning many of the systems that comprised The Sims 4 before spearheading the Professions revamp in World of Warcraft’s Dragonflight expansion. Justin Camden, who also worked on The Sims, is one of Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s technical designers."

"Systematic discovery At first blush, it might not seem like The Sims has much in common with an RPG like Dragon Age outside the fact that they both feature romance in some way. Going back to its release in 2000, The Sims has garnered a reputation as a casual, frequently silly lifestyle simulator; the game where you remove a ladder from a swimming pool and watch your poor little Sims drown. Under the hood, though, The Sims is a complex web of systems, progression and relationships. Sims have jobs. They gain skills. They fall in love. “Maxis is a great place for designers to hone their skills,” Busche says. “There are many projects across differing platforms and service models happening simultaneously which give a rare opportunity for a breadth of experience. What people may not realize about the Sims, given its playful outward nature, is the underlying systems and mechanics are deceptively deep – especially as a dev. One of the more interesting parts of coming up through Maxis as a designer is the experience you get with simulation, emergent gameplay, and emotionally relatable player experiences. It’s just a really unique opportunity being a part of these teams, and those are skillsets that can benefit a number of different games and genres.” Busche’s systems design background is evident throughout The Veilguard. It includes extensive skill trees, with sub-classes that are geared around different weapon types and styles of play, and the choices you make also resonate deeply throughout the story. It’s also possible to level up your relationship with individual factions and shopkeepers, which in turn opens up new possibilities for acquiring unique gear, and characters bear long-lasting scars depending on the choices you make. Systems are layered throughout Dragon Age, deepening the player’s intertwined connection with the world and the characters that inhabit it. “What's so wonderful about [The Sims] is there's so much autonomy in that game, and we find that RPG players are hungry for that same sense of autonomy, making decisions, influencing characters. And what you might not realize in the Sims is behind the scenes, there are some really robust progression systems, game economies, character behaviors for their own AI and autonomy… a lot of really fascinating parallels,” Busche says. “So in that regard, I'm very grateful to my time there, being able to take some of those learnings, whether it's about how to convey romantic progression to the player, or design skill progression, game pacing, a lot of really interesting transferable ideas that you might not think about on the surface." In The Sims, characters go through their daily lives in an idealized world filled with strange but charming characters like Bonehilda (Dragon Age, it should be mentioned, has its own living skeleton in Manfred). While Dragon Age’s characters are still bound by the demands of the story, BioWare goes out of its way to make them seem more alive. As we talk about in our hands-on preview that went up last week, Dragon Age is filled with little messages noting how, for instance, you “traded verbal jabs” with Solas. As we’ll go into in a future article, both platonic and romantic relationships are a big part of how characters grow in Dragon Age. And of course, as anyone who has played a BioWare or Sims game knows, both games have their share of woohooing."

"How Dragon Age learned from The Sims' character creator Ultimately, though, it’s the character creator where the resemblance between the two is the most apparent. Dragon Age’s character creator is extensive, allowing players to adjust physical characteristics including chest size, the crookedness of a character’s nose, and whether or not their eyes are bloodshot, among other features. While custom characters are a time-honored BioWare tradition going back to the days of Baldur’s Gate, The Veilguard draws from the lessons of The Sims in everything from body customization to the flow of the user interface. Cross-pollination like this is common within EA, and Dragon Age: The Veilguard borrows from plenty of other sources as well. That incredible hair technology, for example, got its start within EA’s sports games, meaning your Rook can have a luscious mane like Lionel Messi. But the character creator is perhaps the greatest inflection point between Dragon Age and The Sims. “Character creators are extremely complex, and in many ways even more personal. It’s so important that players feel they can be represented and feel pride in that representation as they go through the creation process,” Busche says. “In particular, I remember we were struggling with some of our iconography, and we turned to each other and said ‘how did The Sims 4 handle this?’ While the technology and UI is quite a bit different, the underlying goals and lessons were quite similar.” She adds that Maxis has a “tremendous wealth of knowledge when it comes to representing gender, identity, and the surprising number of localization issues that come along with that when you’re releasing in different regions and languages.” “It’s always nice when you can draw from that prior experience. See what worked, what didn’t, and how expectations have evolved. The fun part is now we get to pay that forward and have been sharing our knowledge with other teams,” Busche says. On a moment-to-moment basis, of course, The Sims and Dragon Age are two very different games with very different goals. One is a single-player action RPG, the other a lifestyle sim. As studios, too, BioWare and Maxis are in very different places right now. The Sims has been a powerhouse franchise for more than two decades, and EA is seeking to expand its reach with a new movie. BioWare, meanwhile, is seeking to rebuild after stumbling badly with Anthem and Mass Effect Andromeda. But when creator Will Wright first decided to focus on the people inhabiting his games, the world he crafted wasn’t too dissimilar from the one found in Dragon Age. Both use unique systems to create reactive, imaginative worlds full of interesting choices, filled with characters with their own inner lives. It’s a philosophy that’s always been part of BioWare’s legacy; now, in The Veilguard, it finally gets to be on full display once again. Dragon Age: The Veilguard will be on PC, PlayStation, and Xbox on October 31. Make sure to keep an eye on IGN all this month as our IGN First coverage continues."

[source]

[technicaldr]

The Future of 3-D Printing in Medicine

Today’s 3-D printed plastic models of hearts may one day translate into on-demand printed, functional replacement organs.

 A 3-D printed model of conjoined twins that was used to help guide surgeons to plan a separation procedure and help navigate the anatomy once in surgery. This case was late-breaking news highlighted at RSNA 2015.

Science fiction offers a lot of ideas for creating new body parts on demand, and the advancement of 3-D printing (also called additive manufacturing) is slowly translating this idea into science fact. Today, the 3-D printed anatomic models created from patient computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) or 3-D ultrasound imaging data-sets are used for education and to plan and navigate difficult procedures. These models are used to teach about complex or rare cardiac or congenital conditions that up until recently could only be seen using examples extracted from cadavers. Today, anatomical models of rare cardiac anatomy can be printed on-demand from CT scans of surviving patients. 

That concept can now be translated into 3-D printing of implantable devices customised to a specific patient using their imaging. Experts at several medical conferences are saying printing functional biological replacement tissues is already in development. Three-dimensional printing has become a topic of discussion in conference sessions and on the expo floors at many medical meetings over the past several years. The topic was covered in a session at the Radiological Society of North America's (RSNA) annual meeting in December, which is detailed in the following sections.

  Early Experience Printing Implantable Devices:

                           Printed 3-D models are currently used for surgical planning in complex cases, especially in pediatric congenital heart procedures, said Richard G. Ohye, M.D., professor of cardiac surgery, head, section of pediatric cardiovascular surgery, surgical director, pediatric cardiovascular transplant program, co-director, Michigan Congenital Heart Center, C.S. Mott Children's Hospital, Ann Arbor, Mich. However, he explained 3-D printing will soon allow the creation of customised implantable medical devices, including actual tissue or vessel replacements. 

In fact, 3-D printed devices are already being used on a small scale. He presented a case of a three-month-old patient whose airway was underdeveloped and required a splint to hold it open. The patient underwent a CT scan and a 3-D reconstruction of the airway allowed doctors to create a virtual airway splint implant customised to fit into the small anatomy. The design included a “C”-shaped tube that had numerous holes to use as suture anchor points. The shape was designed to allow it to expand outward as the patient grew. They then 3-D printed the splint from bioresorbable plastic and implanted it in the patient. Ohye said the material it was made from is expected to dissolve within three to four years. 

The Finnish dental equipment maker Planmeca recently introduced a 3-D printer that allows dental laboratories and large clinics to create dental splints, models and surgical guides. In the near future, the Planmeca Creo printer will also support the creation of intricate, customised temporary fillings.

The jump to printing full organs to transplant is much more complex, but the groundwork is being laid. Ohye said engineered heart tissue created using cardiac stem cells has already been created, but it is limited to a size of about 200 microns. Anything larger requires blood vessels to keep the cells alive, he explained. 

 3-D Printing of Biological Tissue Implants:

            Research is being conducted to enable 3-D printing of blood vessels, where cells are deposited by the robotically driven printer in patterns that build up layer-by-layer to create a lumen. That same concept is being tested at a few centres to create 3-D print heart valves. Ohye said the process currently being investigated uses a printed matrix of bio compatible material, in which stem cells can then be deposited. If the process can be worked out to create engineered, printed organs, these might be used to create bench-top model organs for new drug testing in the next few years. Implantable 3-D printed living organs for transplant into human patients are also a very real possibility.

“Bio-printing is likely to be a huge field for the future of medicine,” said Roger Markwald, Ph.D., director, Cardiovascular Developmental Biology Center, Medical University of South Carolina. He is involved with The South Carolina Project for Organ Bio-fabrication, one of the groups at the forefront of 3-D bio-printing research. He explained there are too few organ donors to meet demand and there is an even greater need for soft tissues for reconstructive surgeries for things such as injuries, burns, infections, tumor resections and congenital malformations. 

“There are too few organ donors to meet the needs,” Markwald said. “At least 21 people die each day because of the lack of implants.” 

This organ shortage might be solved in the future by bio-printing organs on-demand. Bio-materials can be printed using current technology, but there is a fatal flaw. “The Achilles heel of tissue engineering today is the need to create vascularity in the structure, and that has been the focus of what we have been trying to do,” Markwald said.  

The key to printing vascularizable micro-organs may involve chemical modifications of alginate hydro-gels. Markwald’s lab created an oxidised alginate, which is biodegradable and provides stability for 3-D bio-printing. It also is bio-active, allowing cells to migrate and remodel. They created “plug and play” molds to prepare micro-organ constructs for surgical implantation. These are made with the biodegradable alginate, which contain small molecules to promote host vascular in-growth and suppress inflammatory responses.  

Bio-printing is enabled using a “bio-paper” made of bioresorbable hydro-gels. These allow printing of the cells against gravity and allow the cells to grow, interact and function physiologically. Markwald said research is leading to the development of hydro-gels specific to each type of organ tissue. 

The “bioink” is made from 300 micron diameter spheroids that contain between 8,000-12,000 autologous adipose-derived stem cells. He said it takes about 7 million cells to make 840 spheroids, and it takes thousands of these spheroids to print a 1 mm cube.

Just as 3-D printing allows simultaneous printing of several different colors of materials to build a color 3-D model, bio-printing is being developed to allow use of several different cell types to create complex tissue units. 

“Eventually we will be able to make functional hearts or livers,” Markwald said. “What we can print right now are cardiac patches and small- to medium-sized blood vessels, skin tissue, soft tissue (adipose, muscle) for reconstructive surgery, and vascularized micro-organs that can be grown in a bioreactor and used to supplement the function of a diseased organ like the liver.”

  Creating 3-D Printable Files:

 Creating files for 3-D printing from medical imaging data-sets starts with good imaging, said Shuai Leng, Ph.D., associate professor of medical physics, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minn. “If you start with garbage in, you get garbage out, so you need good image quality,” he stressed.  

To create a usable 3-D file, he suggests using 0.6 mm thin imaging slices. This allows for very smooth surfaces. By comparison, he said use of 6 mm slices will make the printed object very rough and textured, appearing pixelated, when it is printed in 3-D. 

He said dual-energy CT is great for 3-D printing because it can easily exclude bone so only blood vessels or soft tissue remain in the image area. Metal implants commonly cause problems when creating 3-D printing files, but dual-energy systems have metal artifact reduction software to separate the metal and artifacts from the anatomy to allow creation of better models. 

When using 3-D models for procedural planning and navigation, you need to ensure the precision of the model by using U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-cleared 3-D printing software. The resulting printed models also should be compared to the original images to ensure quality control. Before printing, images should be checked in three planes and approved by a radiologist or the ordering physician. 

The final imaging files are converted into STL/CAD files that can be read by the 3-D printers and translated into the final 3-D object.

   Technical Dr. Inc.'s insight:

Technical Dr. Inc.'s insight:

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