Tutorial video for: A toolbox for the retrodeformation and muscle reconstruction of fossil specimens in Blender

Accurate muscle reconstructions can offer new information on the anatomy
of fossil organisms and are also important for biomechanical analysis
(multibody dynamics and finite element analysis). For the sake of
simplicity, muscles are often modeled as point-to-point strands or frustra
(cut off cones) in biomechanical models. However, there are cases in which
it is useful to model the muscle morphology in 3D, to better examine the
effects of muscle shape and size. This is especially important for fossil
analyses, where muscle force is estimated from the reconstructed muscle
morphology (rather than based on data collected in vivo). The two main
aims of this paper are as follows. First, we created a new interactive
tool in the free open access software Blender to enable interactive 3D
modeling of muscles. This approach can be applied to both palaeontological
and human biomechanics research to generate muscle force magnitudes and
lines of action for finite element analysis. Second, we provide a guide on
how to use existing Blender tools to reconstruct distorted or incomplete
specimens. This guide is aimed at palaeontologists but can also be used by
anatomists working with damaged specimens or to test functional
implication of hypothetical morphologies.