Blender used to make cover art for Nature Chemistry
Christopher Wilmer has created this image for the cover of Nature Chemistry, a leading scientific journal.
Hello everybody,
I am Ph.D. student in chemical engineering at Northwestern University in Illinois, Evanston.
I’m very happy to report that my research, and my Blender artwork, is now on the cover of this month’s issue of Nature Chemistry! Their website is: www.nature.com/nchem
Nature Chemistry is one of the top scientific journals in chemistry, so it’s quite exciting for me. I am a somewhat of a Blender evangelist at my university this even will undoubtedly help my cause (I’ve been converting fellow scientists away from Cinema4D and 3dsMax).
A little about the image
The image aims to convey that there are an enormous number of molecules one can use to create new materials. Hence, the number of materials humans have not yet created is vastly enormous. Trying to find an interesting material (to perhaps, capture carbon and save us from global warming) by making it in the lab and testing it is too slow, so we’ve developed a computational algorithm that speeds up the discovery process significantly.
The molecules are depicted as toys (reminiscent of Tinkertoys), which I arranged in a pile (made using Blender game engine + gravity) and then rendered using Luxrender.
Nice job, I like it! This one: http://www.nature.com/nphoton/journal/v5/n10/index.html was also made with Blender. I also made covers for Advanced Materials, Soft Matter and Journal of Materials Chemistry, all with Blender. So don’t let someone tell you Blender is not up to the task!
That Nature Photonics cover is awesome – is that Blender internal renderer or a pathtracing renderer?
I think I used VRay on that one, via bdancer’s script (Props for that). But I find myself using cycles more and more these days and considering it’s stilly a baby the future looks bright for Blender!
Nice work! Looks pretty great – and I had to laugh at the title, very clever :)
Congratulations on making the cover of a Nature journal, Christopher. That’s a very big deal!
Wonder whatever happened to the guy who said Blender could never be used for anything of professional quality! Booyah!
That is great. Ciongratulations on reaching the cover. I have yet to taste that success. I use blender for all my work related artwork. A lot of people now outsource such artwork in the hope that they will score a cover. I find this a ridiculous idea. As a scientist, you should be able to communicate your result and blender is a great tool that allows just that.
I would have to disagree, firstly not everyone has developed his artistic skill and secondly a successful cover illustration is not about communicating an idea but about raising interest (imho). Basically, it’s advertising. But if you are a scientist that can do art that is awesome, I think there is a lot of underestimated beauty in science. A nice quote on the subject: http://www.fieldstudy.com/Classes/Announcements/feynmanquote.htm
When I did my PhD in Chem Eng we were using punch cards and Fortran 4. How things have changed !
You really had to get your global illumination parameters right the first time when you used punchcards.
nice work
Congratulations! Really nice job. It’s very stimulating to see that Blender is used in the field of scientific illustration and especially that top journals also value the quality of it by putting it on their cover.
I use Blender all the time for scientific illustration and i think it’s great! It does the job very well. If you’re interested feel free to check my website (http://www.somersault1824.com).
cheers