3D Animation

Beneath the Surface

December 24, 2008 As promised, here are some images that have come out of our Practicum project on the visualization of Aplastic Anemia.  As always, modeling and rigging are done in Autodesk Maya and texturing is done in Adobe Photoshop.

Modeled by John Corbett

    The animation begins with an image of the human leg and zooms in to this first model, which represents the vein network located under the surface of the skin.  Gross, but effective in establishing the scene.  To make the veins pulse as if blood were flowing through them, Trevor Green came up with a clever technique: we duplicated the textured model and transferred the image map from the first to the second.  We increased the size of the duplicate’s envelope and then created a blendshape between the two.  This allowed us to scrub back and forth between the two different shapes without having to mess with the model’s scale.

Modeled by Trevor Green, Rendered by John Corbett

A dynamics simulation allowed for large numbers of red blood cells to flow through the veins.  We accomplished this scene by creating a Curve Flow and having the particles follow the curve down the tunnel we had designated for the vein.  Then it was a simple matter of replacing the particles with an instance of our red blood cell, meaning we only needed one piece of geometry.  Unfortunately, the cells were all uniform, so our instructor, Pete Eastwood, developed an expression that told each particle to rotate a tiny bit in a random direction every frame, giving the illusion that each was operating independently.

Modeled by John Corbett

    The infectious organisms were a lot of fun to model.  At the cellular level, they can take all kinds of shapes, but we settled on the ones we felt were the most menacing.  Since they would be attacking healthy cells, the invaders needed to have a little more personality, so I gave them simple rigs that would allow them to bend and swim.

Rendered and modeled by Trevor Green

    We achieved the look of the stem cells by applying a facing ratio to the model.  This neat little trick means that no matter what the orientation of the model is, the center will appear more shadowed than the edges.
    Altogether, the animation only has about 18 separate shots, which makes it more manageable than our last group attempt.
 

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