3D Coronavirus Animations in Blender
Introduction
Phew. Remember 2020?
Well it wasn't a great one for many of us...
(Personally it was a great year for me in parts, due to the birth of my daughter).
But the good news is: David Jones is trying to change 2021 and beyond for the better!
And yes, I know, his name sounds like a comic book super hero but he is a real person.
David was very concerned when he found out that there might be a better solution to distributing the various SARS-COV2-vaccines at a faster rate, potentially saving a million lives and ending the pandemic sooner.
The issue? Who would listen to him without proof.
So he dove deeper, researched his current material and reached out to various scientists around the world.
Long story short, he managed to assemble quite the number of high profile supporters but one big problem remained.
Testing.
Such complex changes in vaccine distribution, as the one he had in mind, would need avid testing for real world application. The best way he thought to get anyone interested in his solution was to make a video.
And this is where I came in.
The timing was tough, we only had about 2-3 weeks to get it out, since he had concerns that, at a later point, people's concerns for faster vaccine distribution would diminish as vaccines already rolled out anyway.
If you are interested in his proposal, here is his website: https://www.thehhi.org/
I was hired to work on most of the animations and to do some consultancy on editing and video creation in general.
David helped me understand the inner workings of the mRNA vaccine and the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome - Coronavirus 2 also known as SARS-COV2 (Who's ready for Version 3 ? yaay...)
And whilst I am intrigued and fascinated by his proposal, I can not endorse his idea for a lack of any scientific background in my career, but it seems well worth exploring.
The video-trailer linked above is a short replay of some of the most notewothy creations we made together in a fairly short time.
Furthermore we took reference from "Scientific Animations" for some parts of the mRNA animations, which is important to mention and largely related to the time constraints.
On another note, Geometry Nodes dropped right in time for this project, for which I am forever grateful to the gods of chance.
The following is a short rundown of the creation process ...
Well it wasn't a great one for many of us...
(Personally it was a great year for me in parts, due to the birth of my daughter).
But the good news is: David Jones is trying to change 2021 and beyond for the better!
And yes, I know, his name sounds like a comic book super hero but he is a real person.
David was very concerned when he found out that there might be a better solution to distributing the various SARS-COV2-vaccines at a faster rate, potentially saving a million lives and ending the pandemic sooner.
The issue? Who would listen to him without proof.
So he dove deeper, researched his current material and reached out to various scientists around the world.
Long story short, he managed to assemble quite the number of high profile supporters but one big problem remained.
Testing.
Such complex changes in vaccine distribution, as the one he had in mind, would need avid testing for real world application. The best way he thought to get anyone interested in his solution was to make a video.
And this is where I came in.
The timing was tough, we only had about 2-3 weeks to get it out, since he had concerns that, at a later point, people's concerns for faster vaccine distribution would diminish as vaccines already rolled out anyway.
If you are interested in his proposal, here is his website: https://www.thehhi.org/
I was hired to work on most of the animations and to do some consultancy on editing and video creation in general.
David helped me understand the inner workings of the mRNA vaccine and the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome - Coronavirus 2 also known as SARS-COV2 (Who's ready for Version 3 ? yaay...)
And whilst I am intrigued and fascinated by his proposal, I can not endorse his idea for a lack of any scientific background in my career, but it seems well worth exploring.
The video-trailer linked above is a short replay of some of the most notewothy creations we made together in a fairly short time.
Furthermore we took reference from "Scientific Animations" for some parts of the mRNA animations, which is important to mention and largely related to the time constraints.
On another note, Geometry Nodes dropped right in time for this project, for which I am forever grateful to the gods of chance.
The following is a short rundown of the creation process ...
THE VIRUS
Here's an artistic render of the Corona Virus. You can see the fatty layer in grey and the spike protein in red in the middle of the divided image.
The fatty Layer
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Texture
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The fatty layer is partly made up of 69.140 of the above balls with low geometry distributed via a particle system. On the right side you can see the texture at closeup.
The Spike Protein
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Close Up
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Above you can see the Spike glycoprotein (S) rendered in it's surface representation. The molecule can be represented in various ways, for animation the surface representation is the most efficient one and the most readable for viewers.
Other viewing modes are more complex, and almost impossible to render in animation due to their abundance in geometry. Surfaces can also be decimated and reduced for better performance.
The scientific data came from this site: pdb101.rcsb.org/motm/256
and was transcribed to surface only .pdb which stands for Protein Data Base via PyMol which can be obtained from this page: https://github.com/schrodinger/pymol-open-source
Be careful though since the resulting mesh is fairly high poly, and machines on the lower end might not be able to handle such files.
To import the .pdb into blender, just activate the import option in the preferences in the addons tab. It's included in blender natively.
