Bioluminescent Lifeforms
A scientific 3D animation created with Cinema 4D, Redshift, Adobe Photoshop, and Adobe After Effects
Scientific Visualization Using 3D Animation (ARTIS 408), Professor Anson Call - Iowa State University
Task
For this project, I was tasked with creating some sort of scientific animation. It didn't matter what the subject matter or topic was as long as it was some sort of scientific topic and rendered at 1280 x 720 pixels. I decided to focus on dinoflagellates and crystal jellyfish, but I also modeled a demonstration of how luciferins and luciferase processes create the glowing effect that bioluminescent lifeforms have.
Challenges
Render Times - Subsurface scattering, transmission, and emission channels in Redshift significantly increased render times
Jellyfish Animation - I hadn't used dynamics much before this project, so I was mostly following Daniel Danielsson's tutorial on YouTube to animate the jellyfish, but this tutorial was several Cinema 4D versions old, so I still had to figure a lot of things out myself
Final Result
I ended up heavily modifying a jellyfish that I modeled using Daniel Danielsson's tutorial on modeling and animating jellyfish, but everything else was modeled, animated, and rendered from scratch by myself using Cinema 4D and the Redshift renderer. This was the most I had ever used dynamics in Cinema 4D, and it was definitely a test of my Redshift skills after using the standard and physical renderers for so long! In the end, I'm definitely happy with how it turned out—I was able to effectively use dynamics to make the jellyfish look as if they were propelling themselves forward as well as use all custom Redshift materials to create jelly-like creatures and proteins look as if they were glowing. This was the most challenging 3D modeling project I've done so far, and I'm excited to use what I learned from it in future Cinema 4D projects!
