This is the reel of scientific visualisation company XVIVO, who produce work for all kinds of sectors from educational to commercial to entertainment. It’s fun watching the reel and trying to figure out which sector each animation was created for.
Aside from thinking up alliterative post titles, I have been investigating a plug-in called Molecular Maya (mMaya for short). Having spent numerous frustrating weeks trying to find visual reference for some of these molecules, the discovery of mMaya and the Protein Data Bank (PDB) has been a godsend. Not only can I now find visual reference of proteins on the PDB, I can download Maya models of them!
The downloaded data comes in the form of a .pdb file, which appears to be a group containing smaller groups called “chains,” which contain various particle objects, curves, and an nSolver, which I presume is what drives the vast number of different display options I can choose for the object.
The most important feature in my eyes is the ability to drape a mesh onto it to create a more appealing model. There are various options to tweak this too: in the video below, I have been experimenting with the presets for “high” fidelity (left) and “medium” fidelity (right).
One slight drawback is that the default assigned shaders are… a little garish, so I replaced them with misss_fast_skin shaders. Another drawback is that the mesh (particularly in the case of the “High” mesh) is extremely high-poly, so it has to be Reduced if Maya isn’t to crash. Also, the mesh is always triangular, and there doesn’t seem to be any option to make a quadrangular mesh instead. So I’m now fiddling with Maya’s Quadrangulate function, with… mixed results.
Still, I’m really glad that I found it. The PDB files can be used freely (though citation of the original authors is encouraged). I’m not sure whether I’d be allowed to use them for my project, so I’ll have to check with my supervisor. If I can insert mMaya into my pipeline, I’ll be able to spend more time on the more complex modelling challenges such as the nuclear envelope and chromatin.
“Two of my favourite subjects – art and biology – shared a common and important feature. They both involved a fundamental emphasis on observation and drawing.”
– Dr. Paul Liam Harrison
An incredibly inspiring talk by biomedical animator Drew Berry on why scientific visualisation is so important in helping us see the unseen, and how in many cases it can be much more useful than textbooks or journals.
“This field of view is about… a semester’s worth of biology.”
Thought I would send the animatic off in small chunks to get the seal of approval from Angus, so as to arrest any small scientific discrepancies before they grow into malignancies of artistic licence…
Some more storyboard panels.
Remember that terrible Goals test I did last December? Well I was convinced that I could do more with this feature than I had so far – it’s just that I hadn’t been using it in the correct context. So I did an experiment to teach myself more about it, using the Gnomon Dynamics DVD and a horse run cycle from the Digital Tutors Asset Library. I animated the Goal Weight value and Shader Transparency to make the particles form then disperse, and also applied Turbulence and Vortex fields to make it look less uniform. I learned that when you’re using goals to make a character out of Particles, it’s best to break up the geometry into lots of different sections to give full control over not only how the character forms but also the size and goal weight of the particles forming different body parts.
In my own film, I will be able to use Goals to control the movement of swarms of particles – probably using a locator.
…this is CONCEPTUAL storyboarding (Gnomon style)! I have been watching the Gnomon Conceptual Storyboarding series narrated by Derek Thompson, a storyboard artist at Pixar. It’s totally changed my mind aboyut storyboarding – I hated doing it before, but I love it now!
I had previously assumed that storyboard artists only started work once the designs for the characters and environment had been fully finalised, but I know now that this is not the case. Storyboarding is a much more organic process than I had originally thought, with the look of a film developing as the artist works – killing two birds with one stone, so to speak. As I’m working to a rather limited time frame, this suits me perfectly as I can develop the look of the piece while designing shots. It also means that I can work out whether the environment will actually co-operate with the shots I have in mind. Technically speaking, I also now know how to use Layer Comps in Photoshop, and now sorely wish I’d known about them before.
Progress has been slow – I was bedridden most of yesterday and today with a bout of food poisoning – but here’s one I was working on today.
It’s quite a departure from the way I had previously staged this shot. The reason for changing it is that Angus said that the nucleus was much more densely packed than I had represented it in my pre-viz shot. This presented quite a challenge, as filling the nucleus up with stuff could potentially distract the viewer’s eye from the action. We noticed that in Hidden Life of the Cell, the BBC had avoided this particular scientific truth and built quite a sparse nucleus. Wanting to stay as accurate as possible, Angus said, “I am sure you can do better!”
Better than the Beeb? Hmm… big ask.
So after spending a little while moving things around and playing with colour values and shapes, I hit on a possible solution…LOADS of depth of field! Focusing only on where the action was happening and blurring the rest would still keep the impression of a densely packed nucleus, but not distract the eye. At least, I hope that it will work. And now, armed with my new conceptual storyboards, I’m fairly confident that it will.
Just a quick test to see how this works (and that it works with the displacement maps). Jiggle deformers were one of the stars of the show in my graduate film when I used them to create cartoony hair. They’ll be featured extensively in this film too, for a bit of dynamic squash, stretch and follow-through.
Did some more look development on my p53 sculpt last night, with the help of two Digital Tutors courses: Creative Development: Subsurface Scattering Shaders in Maya and mental ray with Jon Tojek and Mastering Displacement Maps in Maya.
I used the misss_fast_skin_maya shader, which utilises Subsurface Scattering. You can see the scatter on the edges of the model – it’s more red where the light shines through. I decided to leave the scatter on its default skin colours – it seems to follow aesthetically that skin cell molecules should have a skin-like tone to them (though in real life they would be colourless). I’m really pleased with the effect it gives the model, and I think I shall be using it extensively in my film. I’m pleased that the look’s finally starting to come together!
Cell Shading 