Half-a-mile tall building

[Karlos]

I wonder how long it would take a chunder from the top to reach the ground? And what kind of area it would cover?

[Karlos]

X-ray wrote:

In fact, I could probably retrospectively reconstruct these gunshot spine injuries, just by scanning the films  on my Epson 4870, adjusting the levels in Photoshop so that we have an edge pixel value of 255,255,255 and then slap those onto some slabs in Cinema 4D. The only thing I would have to figure out is how to 'trim' the excess black from the rendered stack.

Well, wouldn't you just make the black transparent?

[Karlos]

Presented with a problem like this, I'd get annoyed and then hit a C compiler ;-)

Assuming the scans are false colour, I'd assign a transparent colour.

I'd load each image in turn, pre-rotate it into a desired perspective (either using it as texture for an OpenGL quad, or perhaps some custom rendering routine) and stack them depth sorted (farthest away first) according to the current viewing direction.

It wouldn't give you a realtime view, of course (unless your machine has some real grunt) but it would give you a 3D reconstruction from the slices.

[Karlos]

@X-Ray

TBH, it wouldn't be ideal. It's conceptually not any different from printing your slices (with the black set transparent) on acetate and stacking them.

[Karlos]

@X-Ray

Alas 3D modelling and animation is to me what C++ is to you perhaps :-)

However I'm glad you found a way :-D

[Karlos]

Its probably a pendulum effect of some kind that absorbs the translational energy and keeps the building vertical when all the rest are shearing side to side and bouncing up and down...

Or something...