The hippocampal formation: a short overview

I think the hippocampal formation is one of the hardest regions to understand with regard to its overall shape and connection patterns. In the rodent it crosses all three axes in the brain and the orientation of its convoluted layers changes across its septal-temporal axis. Therefore, I am happy to share with you a video that I produced recently, in which I show how the hippocampal formation looks like in 3d. For me it was also a good exercise to produce a video for Youtube, as I am going to produce more in the next weeks.

Blender Addon: Map via UV

Here is a little operator that I wrote for Blender. This operator is basically a side-result of a larger project I am working on but I thought it is worth sharing this as it might be useful for others as well.

The aim is to bring a given mesh-surface into another shape. For example, in the picture below, I would like to transform the right mesh (the origin) into the form of the left mesh (the target) while its internal topology should be maintained.

mapviauv01

I found that the easiest way to achieve this is, to unwrap both objects and simply define in UV-space how the right mesh should cover the left mesh.

mapviauv02

The only important point here is that any point in the UV-map of the origin mesh must be in the area of the UV-map of the target-mesh. Then, hit “map via UV” and you got

mapviauv03

The addon and additional information as well as some debugging issues can be found and discussed in this BlenderArtists-Thread.