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Video: The Hungry Microbiome

19
By on Video

Chris Hammang shares a bio-medical animation he created. The result is stunning.

Chris writes:

Check this out. This is a bio-medical animation I made at CSIRO over the course of a year. The video depicts the human gut microbiome, and shows how resistant starch can feed your healthy gut bacteria so that they can keep your intestines healthy and even help prevent cancer.

All animation and modelling was done entirely in Blender. All 3D rendering was done using the cycles ray tracing render system.

Cheers,
Chris

About the Author

Avatar image for Bart Veldhuizen
Bart Veldhuizen

I have a LONG history with Blender - I wrote some of the earliest Blender tutorials, worked for Not a Number and helped run the crowdfunding campaign that open sourced Blender (the first one on the internet!). I founded BlenderNation in 2006 and have been editing it every single day since then ;-) I also run the Blender Artists forum and I'm Head of Community at Sketchfab.

19 Comments

  2. Spproplus on

    Very instructive video on the microbiome, and the resistant starch. I've just learned not only something new thanks to you, but also very important. Thank you. Also, congratulation on the use of our beloved blender to make this professional looking video animation!

    Reply
    • Chris Hammang on

      Indeed, the gut Microbiome is critical to health, and new research is finally starting to reveal why and how.

      Reply
    • Chris Hammang on

      Thank you. I worked very hard to try and carve out a clear story that is easy to follow. This is a big challenge when working on science videos because I am simultaneously trying to depict every aspect of the science as accurately as possible.

      Reply
    • Chris Hammang on

      Most scenes were composites of 2 to 4 layers. I used about 128 to 512 samples for most scenes (sometimes only 32 samples for backrounds, and then lens blurred to remove noise). The different scenes took between 15 seconds to 2 minutes to render. There was no single frame that took more than 2 minutes and 30 seconds.

      The different scenes in the video had no more than 800 frames, which meant even at 2 minutes a frame, I could render a scene overnight to see the result next day, and then make changes to render again the next night. Sometimes I would render scenes with just 16 samples to get a feel for the look and movement.

      Everything was rendered in Cycles. I used a home built computer with 2 custom water cooled GTX Titan 6GB cards. It turns out, I did not need all that memory for the scenes, 2gb would have been enough. But those 2600 or so CUDA cores are extremely useful!!!

      Thanks for watching,
      Cheers,
      Chris

      Reply
  7. SaphireS on

    This is awesome, as a student of biomedical engineering this is exactly the stuff I hope to achieve using Blender! :)

    Reply
          • Utopia780 on

            Thank you Chris!
            Stocktrek Images is a stock image and video site that ask some freelance artists to do medical visualizations. It was a great experience. I hope to be lucky enough to do this again.
            Maybe the pharmaceutical industry needs some visualization? That would be sweet!
            I hope you get more jobs like this one! ..and me too!

          • Fred Hystair on

            Hi Chris, Hi Utopia
            Thx for sharing these fantastic works.
            I am also working in a scientific institute and trying to develop the use of Blender and scientific visualisation with my colleagues.
            What I see here is extremely motivating and inspiring.
            @ chris : congrats for this Microbiome film. The fact that you managed to keep so low rendertimes reveals a master use of cycles. Do you have tips to optimise your shaders while maintaining such quality? Your textures are certainly mainly procedural but the result is so organic!
            Did you render in 1080 or 720px? It's a dilemma I often have when doing animations? Any advice?
            Thx again for showing such quality and "usefully applied" work.

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