As I browse through Curious Cat sometime before, I came across this interesting article outside of chemical engineering, more towards bio-stuff. It is about the animation of cell inside the out body. "The Inner Life of a Cell, an eight-minute animation created for Harvard biology students… illustrates unseen molecular mechanisms and the ones they trigger, specifically how white blood cells sense and respond to their surroundings and external stimuli." The online video is beautiful, Check out -
Cellular Visions: The Inner Life of a Cell
“What we did in some cases, with the full support of the Harvard team, was subtly change the way things work,” Liebler says. “The reality is that all that stuff that’s going on in each cell is so tightly packed together that if we were to put every detail into every shot, you wouldn’t be able to see the forest for the trees or know what you were even looking at. One of the most common things we did, then, was to strip it apart and add space where there isn’t really that much space.”
The video includes a nice musical soundtrack. It would be great to have alternative soundtracks explaining the science behind the animation.
XVIVO, a scientific animation company near Harford, CT, created this molecular animation using NewTek LightWave and SOFTIMAGE XSI
XVIVO also relied heavily on PDB (Protein Data Bank) Reader, another LightWave plug-in well known in the scientific animation community that brings in both the point cloud data and XYZ coordinates for all the atoms in a protein
XVIVO lead animator John Liebler discovered Happy Digital’s HD Instance, what he now refers to as a “magic plug-in for instancing,” for global motions through displacements.