Titanoboa & Fireside Chat

This is an abbreviated replay of June 5 presentation with a Fireside Chat attached.

The Science Behind Titanoboa

Dr. Alex Hastings will lead part of the tour discussing the world of Titanoboa, 60 million years ago. How and why was the snake so big? What else lived in those murky waters?  Plus he’ll share what it was like finding Titanoboa fossils in the Cerrejon coal mine.

Linda Kelley’s Ecosystem

Linda will talk a little about what it takes to bring fossils to life and particularly building an ecosystem from what is shown and not shown in the fossil records. For her this entailed doing a lot of literature review and sussing out how all these things could plausibly fit together.  In addition to the fauna that shared space with the Titanoboa, and the kinds of flora,  this included reading about geologic changes during that period and estimates of Paleocene weather.

Creating an Animated Animesh Titanoboa for Second Life

Dr. Greg Bollella will discuss the process for creating, texturing, rigging, and animating an animesh object for Second Life. Most of the presentation will be an overview of the processes with more detail for a few very interesting techniques and observations. The workflow and tool-chain are important and will be presented. The tools used were, ZBrush, Maya, Photoshop, Substance Painter, and Substance Designer.  Of particular interest is that no images were used in creating the textures for Titanoboa, only math!

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