Getting ready for London

I am preparing for the London studio visits by making new business cards and a new website, at www.sarahjcgillespie.com.

Dynamic Fishing…

Sounds like the best extreme sport ever, but sadly in real life only involves Maya, more particularly MEL.  This is a shoal simulation of fish that I will be using as a base for my simulations in the Going Live project.  I instanced Sean’s swim cycle and have used MEL to:

– Randomise the start point of the swim cycle.

– Randomise the scale of individual fish.

– Connect the speed of the swim cycle to the velocity of the fish, so that the cycle speeds up if the fish are travelling faster.

Skin

I’ve been modelling the outer layer of skin.  I noticed when looking at pictures of skin close up that the top layer of skin is slightly translucent so you can see some of the hair underneath, so I’ve tried to emulate this using a semi-transparent plane (mia_material_x) on top of another plane (misss_fast_skin_maya) with the root of the hair sandwiched between the two.  Not sure whether I’ll still get the scattering this way so will have to do some more testing.

A Question of Scale

So I’ve been doing some more work on the nuclear envelope and endoplasmic reticulum (ER for short) and I’ve been having a bit of trouble trying to determine the exact scale to work to.

This is my original storyboard sketch of that establishing shot:

This was largely based on a drawing in The Biology Coloring Book (Griffin and Vadala, 1986).

This was what I ended up with, as I posted earlier:

I decided to look up some artistic interpretations of this part of the cell for additional reference.  I found this from The Flow: (MRK, 2012)

And this, from Secret Universe: The Hidden Life of the Cell (BBC, 2012)

What I instantly noticed was that the ER in these shots seems to go on forever (an impression assisted by copius amounts of depth of field. And FOG), and be much more densely packed around the nucleus.  The result is a much greater sense of – for lack of a better word – epic-ness. And scale.  The cell just seems bigger in these shots.  Yes, a cell is really extremely tiny (a fact re-iterated by my biology student sister who spent many frustrating hours trying to extract a cell nucleus, only to accidentally crush it with what was, relatively speaking, an ENORMOUS needle).  But if you were to shrink down to the size of a virus, or, say – a p53 molecule, the cell would seem immeasurably huge.  I realised then that I should be aiming for a larger sense of scale.  Plus, it would save me the hassle of modelling the other organelles in the background. Considering that modelling the ER proved insanely difficult, this would be a welcome change.

So I’ve re-jigged the model somewhat.  Not sure that it’s quite there yet – the nuclear pores still seem a bit big – but I think it’s better than before. I may experiment with changing the focal length of the camera too, to alter the scale.

Modelling Update

p53. Pre-sculpt, obviously.

Nuclear pore, now with added depth.

Nuclear envelope.

Top view of nuclear envelope with rough endoplasmic reticulum.

A section of chromatin. How I’m going to get hundreds more of these into my scene without breaking my computer (or my brain) is a question that I’ve yet to fully look into.

Lastly (for fun) I’ve been looking at some of the free HDRs on hdrlabs.com to use as atmospheric “fill lights.” This is my favorite one, of the Milky Way.  Thinking about renaming my film “p53 (and other organelles)… in SPACE!!.”

I joke.

A Long Expected Blog Post

So it’s been a while since my last blog post. The reasons for this are twofold – literally, two other modules, both of which have elements that I’m not allowed to talk about on here for various reasons, which include (but are not limited to) the potential violation of ethics agreeements and – at worst – a lawsuit.

So after a few weeks of feeling a bit like an MI6 agent, except armed with Powerpoint, Maya and a dictaphone, I have finally amassed enough stuff that I’m actually allowed to talk about to form a new blog post.

1. I have been leading the Going Live project, a simulation of a real-world project in conjunction with The Mill.  In addition to the chairing of various meetings, I have been (partly) modelling and sculpting our central character, a Right Whale.  Here he (she?) is:

My next steps will involve the dynamic simulation of some fish.

2. I also presented in a Mock Symposium for the Reflection on Practice module, for which I focused specifically on cross-disciplinary collaboration.  Here’s a selection of slides from that:

 

We also had to submit a complementary essay last week, hence the lack of physical output of late.

3. As for my personal project, I am happy to report that Angus was happy with the new animatic, aside from two minor scientific mistakes:

– What I referred to as “p19” in the animatic is actually “p14,” p19 being the mouse equivalent of the protein.

– The protein actually folds as it is being produced, rather than afterwards as I have shown it.

So I have now begun the modelling process. I am currently working on the nuclear envelope and pores, which look like this at the moment:

I am also looking into ways to re-topologise the mMaya meshes, as they are proving prohibitively heavy and triangulated.

Think that’s all for now.