Hi Dave,
Thank you for the explanation! I am happy to take a punt on programming the nodes for the thoracic spine. I can see all other nodes for muscle attachments have been defined; it is just the endplate nodes that missing and that is what I am planning to do. I got a few more questions though before I do this:-
- I reckon I know how to export the surface mode now based on this post. I presumed when you said 'unscaled' stl, the 'Scaling Factor' should be 1.0 and the 'Reference Frame' selection is 'local' instead of 'global'? I believe the there might be a slight change in the export settings because of the change of class from DrwSurf to BoneDraw for the Trunk. I also just realised that all of the thoracic vertebrae have the same origin point, i.e. at the bottom of T12, from my observation of the code and supported by this post.
- My next question would be whether the anterior/posterior/medial nodes are encoded in the stl source itself or do I have to define these points myself from the stl rendering (literally, pick a point on the endplate surface to be a node)? Does this mean, if I have to pick the point myself, I need to render all 12 vertebrae at the same time in order to identify the coordinate for those ant/post/med nodes since they all will need to be referring to the common origin? Following on that, do you have any suggestion which software that I could use to render the stl files so I could identify the coordinate of the point that is being picked? At the moment, I am thinking of just using Solidworks, but I haven't tried it yet.
I hope my questions are not too trivial as I am still discovering!
Thank you.
Kind regards,
Faizal