Going microscopic
This was the first project I completed when I made the switch from Mantra (Houdini’s built in renderer) to Redshift. I had a look at some online tutorials to get me started with the basic idea, but then set out to add my own twist.
The best part about this project is all the animation on the spheres and the displacement is done at render time. No heavy geometry slowing anything down. Redshift tessellates and deforms the geometry for me in the shader. I just created and animated the noise parameters, as well as animating the orbit of the smaller spheres around the central one.
Geometry
The image below is all of the cell geometry. It’s just 5 spheres!
Particles
I wanted to make the scene a little more interesting with some tiny particles floating about. Originally this was just going to be for a nice Depth of Field effect but once I had that working I thought it would be fun to have the cells interact with the particles.
I set up the basic cell spheres as collision objects so the particles would get knocked about as the cells grow and move around the scene. I had to add drag and confine the speed of the particles but I was left with a pleasing and simple effect. I think it looks as if the cells and the particles are suspended in a fluid.
Below is the final scene that was to be rendered, just the cell spheres and a few thousand particle points, a very light scene file.
Rendering
Below is the render without the particles and no displacement on the spheres.
The image below shows the cells with the render time displacement activated.
The shader had quite a few elements such utilizing Fresnel’s and Curvature to get a particular look. There is also a good amount of Subsurface Scattering on each cell to make it look more organic. I will definitely be seeing what other kinds of cells I can create! I would like to make some divide and replicate, so watch this space.
As always, a tidy scene file, is a happy scene file!