Blood Flow: Widescreen trade show montage element
Here’s a clip from a 10-minute animation about HDL-cholesterol and it’s effects on the body. The client had asked us to choose several shots from the show and repurpose them into a shorter piece: an “eye candy” montage that would be displayed on a super-wide wraparound screen mounted above a cafe booth at a trade show. The dimensions were 1800 x 400 pixels. Click the full screen toggle for a better view.
I used cinema 4d and the mograph module to set up the blood flow, and then used the aging but trusty pyrocluster shaders applied to a particle emitter inside the vessel to add the sense of smoky plasma whooshing through. Not happy with how the pyrocluster smoke came out, a bit patchy, but hope to remedy it soon. Really needs sound!
Joel, how do you handle the epithelial cells inside the vein?
Is that a texture or you place them one by one?
Thats ENDOthelial cells
(epithelial cells cover the surfaces of most other tissue in the body, but endothelial cells line the interior/lumen of a blood vessel)
The cells are actual geometry, not a texture map, although the cells themselves are textured. One of the guys I work with built a small group of endothelial cells arranged in a repeatable tile that I cloned and then wrapped 360 degrees. I then deformed the result via a spline wrap object to a particular path. I then built the smooth muscle layer and a simplified tunica advantitia outer layer. If you watch carefully the whole vessel diilates about halfway through (was the point of the original animation, but in this clip the effect is diinsished due to the low camera move and the foreground rbcs and smoke.
I’ll post an image of the endothelium tile here if I can figure out how to
ahhh–remedied–heres the tile image:
Thanks for your interest!
-joel
That is amazing. Thank you for the correction and the detailed explanation Joel.
Dilation of the vessel is really hard to see. I wouldn’t recognize if you hadn’t told so. Dilation is a crucial element I think in these type of blood flow animations. Otherwise vessel just looks like a plain pipe.