Microbial Musings

Our team recently created a short 30 second show opener for a corporate/industrial video being produced by the production/mograph house RE:Made. The goals of the project were to communicate the innovative nature of the company and its industrial surface coating products in a dramatic, “high-tech” way, diving all the way down to the macro level on various metallic surfaces.

Its always nice working on creative project like this and getting to bring out tools like X-Particles and Realflow to play with. Was a fast-paced but fun project!

A few tests with C4DtoA (Arnold render engine v02) using some very basic materials. Would make for a very interesting (if not slightly disturbing) outdoor park or museum installation! Tumor with angiogenic vasculature.

Melissa is an artist who was raised in the Philadelphia area. With a longtime passion for the arts, science, writing, and reading, Melissa has always sought ways to bring together her various interests. She attended Boston University, where she received a BFA in painting in 2016. She has since returned to the Philadelphia area, where she held a position at Art Dept. Studios before joining the team at MadMicrobe Studios. She is excited to begin this new phase in her career and looks forward to learning and growing with MadMicrobe Studios. Outside of her career, Melissa enjoys traveling, experimenting with various visual art forms, playing tug-of-war with her pit bull, and spending time with family and friends.

MadMicrobe proudly welcomes our new lead 3D Generalist, Andy Lefton to our growing team!

Andy is an award winning 3D/VFX artist, illustrator and director with over 12 years of experience working within all realms of the animation industry, from medical animation to high-end cinematic effects and filmmaking.

With his extensive knowledge in the field, Andy is accustomed to wearing many hats and strives to push the envelope and stay ahead of this exciting and ever-changing industry.

Nick Woolridge, Professor and Director of Biomedical Communications at the Institute of Medical Science at the University of Toronto has recently updated his NeuronBuild python script for Cinema 4D, and has also just released a new script for ZBrush. The scripts allow the user to pull actual neuron morphology data  from the online repository NeuroMorpho.org and generate 3d models for use in either program.

Nick has generously provided these scripts for free on GitHub and they are not only useful for visualizing neuronatomy in medical illustration and animation, but are also extremely addictive and fun to work with. Thanks Nick!

The image above depicts a Purkinje cell, which is a type of neuron found in the cerebellar cortex of the brain. The morphology data was pulled from the NeuroMorpho site (see below).

The data was imported as zSpheres into ZBrush via Nick’s zScript. At this stage the spheres can be edited, deleted (etc) based on your needs, and then can be baked into geometry via the Adaptive Skinning function in ZBrush. The model was then sent to Cinema 4D via the GoZ script for texturing, and rendering.

You can check out Nick’s video walkthroughs for the C4d and ZBrush python scripts below.

Another exciting week! MadMicrobe won another award for their Life Science reel “WONDERS WITHIN” at the 2017 Digital ADDY Awards hosted by the Philly Ad Club.

We are proud and humbled, not to mention inspired to continue pushing our creative ideas further in the coming year and getting more of our work out there.

We were also delighted to learn that our friends at Pretty Damn Sweet also cleaned up with a handful of awards, including two Silver ADDYs for their Adobe Summit and Adobe MAX show openers, each of which we had the pleasure of contributing to. Great job guys!