Our most popular course was designed to introduce new or unfamiliar users to the most powerful biomechanical software available. Through 8 hours of online videos, it teaches you all the techniques you need to start using Visual3D on your own and developing your own projects.
The first joint we expand our modeling skills to include in Visual3D Basics is the elbow. Defining the upper arm is not quite a simple as any of the lower body segments. In this tutorial, we show you how to create landmarks in a variety of ways to have full control of each segment both in the static trial and the dynamic trials. We also employ some key concepts regarding joint coordinate systems.
The peculiarity of defining a thorax earned this segment it’s own chapter. Due to the technical definition of proximal and distal, picking targets or landmarks can get confusing. Also, the segment coordinate system will most likely need to be rotated to suit your needs. In this chapter, we focus not only on defining the thorax segment, but also on customizing its appearance in the 3D viewer.
Having already defined the arms in chapter 2 and the thorax in chapter 3 of this unit, we can now cheat a bit to define the shoulder. In this tutorial, we show you how to append a model to another one by adding the arms to the thorax. We also discuss how to reason through small modifications that might be necessary when appending models.
The final segment to discuss is the head. Adding the head to the thorax model, we can define the cervical joint. In this tutorial, we show you how to create a useful landmark at the center of the head in order to create this segment. We also show you some best practices to customize the coordinate system and appearance of the model in Visual3D.
As an introduction to more advanced calculations in Visual3D, we focus this video on the right-hand rule. In order to understand segment coordinate systems and how they contribute to joint rotation calculations, we need to make sure that the axis defitions are clear. The right-hand rule is an easy tool to use to help users navigate this complex topic.
As workspaces become more complex, to properly perform biomechanical calculations, users need to keep organized. In this chapter, we focus on how to open the various motion and static/calibration files and ways to keep them organized using tags as we process the data in them.
Many types of calculations in biomechanics involve kinematics in some respect. The motion between two segments is the foundation for many calculations such as joint angles and joint moments. For this reason, it is essential to understand how coordinate systems are defined and how to tweak them to describe exactly what you are trying to measure.
The most fundamental relationship between the motion of two segments is the the joint rotation. This motion is described by a 3×3 matrix and is the basis for joint angles.
Throughout many calculations in biomechanics – and therefore Visual3d – the Cardan sequence has a significant impact on the results. In this chapter, we explain what a Cardan sequence is, and how it impacts your data when calculating, for example, a joint angle.
Simpler motions, typically benefit from the use of a Cardan sequence, however, more complex joints like the shoulder may require the use of an Euler sequence. In this chapter, we highlight the need for and use of Euler sequences to calculate joint angles. However, these concepts can be applied to other parameters as well.
