| One of the most underused tools for selling big cases in my opinion is smile simulations. These can be done quickly on any new patient or patient interested in cosmetic treatment and, if done well, they can be incredibly motivating for patients. Imagine being this patient: you’re ashamed of your teeth and can’t imagine spending the money to fix them because you cant even imagine what it would look like to have nice teeth. |
Simply get a smiling pic at approximately the right VDO and you can do this in five minutes. This particular simulation was done in a monthly subscription software called DTS Pro which I really like.
You can’t tell me you wouldn’t do a ton more elective cases by implementing this. However, many get turned off by monthly fees and even photoshop these days is a monthly subscription fee.
Enter GIMP. I’m not sure where I heard about it but it’s basically a free/open source program like photoshop that anyone can download. It’s incredibly robust and there are tons of tutorials on youtube including one I made which I’ll link in next post.
Basically what you do is have your base layer of the patient smiling. You can pull in individual teeth or an entire smile and position it properly. This simulated smile would then get sandwiched on top by the same full face photo with the mouth cutout. That’s the basics. The downside is you’d need to create your own library of nice smiles. I did this by just going through some cosmetic dentist’s websites and snipping their after smile pics and just saving them in a folder.
Here you can see some of them in my powerpoint template.
Ok now in the software, I’ve just opened the picture of my own smile……..worn teeth and short anteriors from my sleep apnea when I was a fatty.
You can pull in all kinds of visualization aids to help you align the perfect teeth.
Again, you can pull in an entire smile which is awesome for FMR, implant rehabs, and dentures or you can pull in individual tooth images and superimpose them like I’ve done here. This option takes a bit longer but gives you incredible control and ability to customize things exactly to your patient.
Now I’ve just duplicated my base layer of my face and cut out everything between the lips on the top copy. I’ll just bring that layer to the top where it’s over my simulated teeth and you get this photorealistic smile simulation.
I also love that you can turn the transparency of your simulated teeth up and down which really lets you (or more important, your lab) visualize how much tooth structure needs to be altered. I can’t overemphasize the importance of this not only for lab communication, but also because you need to see if your simulation is even possible……..for example, if you’re doing a crown and bridge rehab, you have pretty strict limits to how much you can alter teeth with crown and bridge. You might create some amazing simulation that looks great but can’t really be done without ortho or orthognathic surgery.
This was an example of a case where none of the smile simulation softwares were giving me good results. She has such a wide lip display and a narrow arch that everything I tried looked goofy. I was able to do this in gimp in about 8 min with individual teeth
