Today’s post highlights an attempt to gain favour with a potential client. Since March, work has been somewhat quiet; there’s not a lot of requirement for an exhibition designer at the moment! At the end of last week, a recruitment agency approached me looking for an animator. The role is to produce a medical animation; however, to be considered, I would need to provide samples of previous medical type animations. An understandable request, but frustrating when one has a strong portfolio of work and is looking to move away from a sector which is currently unsustainable!
These three medical animation samples are the result of a weekends work. They are not animations at a final state, but hopefully, show some potential to highlight what an exhibition designer can achieve given the opportunity! Given more time, I would take these to a far higher standard, sadly time was against me. I will return to them in the future hopefully. I hope you enjoy watching them as much as I enjoyed producing them.
Cell Animation Sample
This first animation is my take on a tutorial by Velocitypeak.com. A great tutorial and I’d recommend taking a look at their site for some other great material. Their tutorial for bubble tendrils uses Redshift for the render engine; I wanted to use the Corona Render engine so had to adapt my process to suit a different environment and material setup.
Blood Vessel Sample
This next animation shows activated t-cells travelling along a blood vessel with platelets. At specific points, a few of the t-cells divert via a collider object, allowing them to escape the flow of the blood vessel and become loose within the body.
For the surface of the surroundings, I created a bespoke texture within Substance Designer. The material utilises displacement maps and normal maps to make the great pillowing effect.
The blood vessel was modelled within ZBrush using ZSpheres; this allows for easy branching of tubular shapes. Once happy with the form and branching, I created the adaptive skin and remeshed the geometry to reduce the polygon count and create more flowing contours.
Biological Tendrils Sample
The third animation utilises the XParticles Tendrils system with dynamic interactions. As a medical animation sample, I thought this would be an excellent opportunity to include a touch of subsurface scattering to help give the impression of seeing something at a macro scale. The camera setup also consists of a very narrow depth of field to improve further this close up view of a biological cell.
