1. What was the most challenging part of having to show all the elements of the wing structure at once?

It was, and still is, the visual complexity of making all parts of the bat's anatomy visible at once. In a perfect world, each system/organ of the bat would be legible and readable in combination with another other system/organ, or several. With the time and precision constraints of CavePainting, this is impossible. The best we can do is to spend time and effort making certain combinations as legible as possible—optimizing for the combinations that will be most useful to biologists studying flight dynamics. For example, in my focus on bodily distortion of the wing, I found it would be most useful to see the correlation between the bending of the skeletal structure and the stretching of the membrane. I concentrated on making these two structures legible simultaneously.

2. What visual tradeoffs did you have to make to keep the composition "stable" throughout the wingbeat while highlighting the important part?

I found it to be necessary to emphasize certain movements past the location of the data "dots" to ensure legibility to viewers unfamiliar with the detailed data. The imprecise nature of painting in the CAVE meant that significant-but-subtle distortions were hard to see. Reinforcing elements such as shading and exaggeration helped clarify. Given enough time, I would have created a "photorealistic" version and an exaggerated version of the wing shape at each timestep.

3. What visual characteristics did you use to represent each part of the wing and why?

Skeleton: tubes and flat tubes stretch-mapped with a bone texture with optional highlighting. This combination let me approximate a realistic structure while "breaking out" of reality where necessary to highlight a more abstract variable, such as tension in the bone.

Membrane: 2D ribbons stretched between bones with an alpha mask. I attempted to create a visual representation of "stretching" to indicate which areas of the membrane are experiencing the most tension at each timestep.

Muscle: tubes and flat tubes pattern-mapped with a muscular texture and optional highlighting. This was simpler than the skeletal structure, based on the assumption that an entire muscle is either active or inactive at a given time.

Circulatory, and elastic fibers: thin tubes stretch-mapped with a pattern indicating highlighting on the active area. These systems are relevant to bodily distortion, but not necessarily at the macro level of skeleton and membrane. The viewer focusing on distortion should think of these systems as secondary, and should have to zoom in to see these in detail.