Video: The Hungry Microbiome
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
The animation is outstanding, really.
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!
Indeed, the gut Microbiome is critical to health, and new research is finally starting to reveal why and how.
fantastic result, also like the storytelling, everything ties together
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.
Great work!
I cant imagine how time it took for render..
hahahaha
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
hmmmmm.. Titan!
Titan is not necessary to be honest. A GTX 780 will perceptibly render at the same speed. none of the scenes in my video were more than 2.5GB on the graphics card.
Very nice video! And I learned something for my health! Great :)
Thank you all for watching!
This is awesome, as a student of biomedical engineering this is exactly the stuff I hope to achieve using Blender! :)
Very nice work! Congrats!!
Great work Chris!
I love these kind of visualizations!
Do you have more?
Cheers!
This really is my first ever complete animation. The only other work I have done are some small 20 second tests.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=po9BqzfN9Mo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=saYK4Xseg2g
But: There will be more videos coming in the future ;) Stay tuned.
Great! Subscribed!
If you’re interested you can check my bio-medical showreel here:
https://vimeo.com/75327735
That is some very beautiful work. How did you get the opportunity to make these visualizations?
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!
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.