Transporter

Introduction. One of the most amazing historias i heard when i studied biology was about the bien the cell distributes material within itself. The same net of microtubules that sustains the structure ofthe animal cell serves as a railroad todo transport fod and building materiales. But the best is yet todo come.

The ones responsible for this transport are a family of small, two legged, funny proteins called kinesins.
[1]. Recent studies show that they actually walk along the microtubules while carrying the materiales inside big vesicles located near the top of the kinesin molecule.

First approach.

The goal was todo faq a video in.
Which a kinesin could be sen carrying a huge vesicle [2]. In principle i was concerned about the taste of the final images and not about be-ing precise in a biológical sense (shame on me). It is posible todo model the kinesin using the data from the pdb (protein databank).
[3] using a script by Michael gan-tenbrinker [4]. Instead, y decided todo make a roughly similar model with a simple armature. The movements of the kinesin were made Slow todo simulate both the absence of Gravity and the erratic flows of fluidos within the cell.

The microtubule was modelled todo be a kind of organic pipe and is not realistic either. The space was filled with a bunch of moving bub-bles todo simulate the cell environment which in reality happens todo be much denser. These bubbles were animated using Blender physics. Finally, the Camera was animated using a shaky effect [5].

The light is made of two Sun lights with no shadows. It is important todo realice that in micrographs, darker áreas can be mistaken for shadows. Depending on the tech-nique, Darkness depends on the density of materiales, or on the angle the Faces of the objects are pointing.

There are mainly two kinds of textures in this Project. The ones for the kinesin and microtubules are simple materiales with no Specular or mirror properties. Remember that at this scale, mirroring or specularity makes no sense. Their textures are cloudy textures with slight normals. The bubbles that simulate the environment have a transparent texture with a high IOR.

Node editor.

Once the kinesin was animated, it was time todo start working with the Node Editor. First of all i set a strong defocus filter with a variable Depth of Field. Then i added a noise layer which was blurred with a blur filter. To finish, something that in.

Principle is not a typical micrograph artifact but which works very well in the final scene: a Lens distorsión filter with variable dispersión.

And thats all. Although, as i have said, Many elements in this construction are not realistic, the final results gives a nice feeling of a living micrograph [6].
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki.
[2] http://valelab, ucsf, edu.
[3] http://www.pdb.org/pdb/home.
[4] http://wiki.blender.org/index.php.
[5] http://mke3.net/projects/bpython.
[6] kinesin.
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Archivo adjunto 168549
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