Blender for Scientists: 3D Scientific Illustration for Beginners

1. Introduction: Have you ever thought of a tool that will allow you to visualize anything you can imagine so that you can create any illustration you want in 3D to effectively communicate your science. Yes. There is one software, it is called Blender. Blender is a 3D animation software developed by thousands of people over the span of 27 plus years, and currently being updated every single day. Unlike other 3D programs, blender has no subscription fee or any other payments involved, which means you can use Blender for even commercial purposes. Blender founder tone, blues, and dial one said it would remain free for ever. Learning. Blender is a lifetime investment for any science researcher or science communicator. This animation you are about to see was produced using Blender. Here you can clearly see the production quality is top nodes. This means you can do modeling, texturing, VFX, rigging, sculpting, sculpting, simulations, and video editing using Blender. As a researcher or a science communicator. You may not want to learn all these features, but learning the basics of blender itself will allow you to make 3D illustrations for your manuscript, thesis, research proposal, blog post, presentations, etc. For the past six years, I have been using blender to make illustrations for the manuscript. Toc graphics generally cover arts and animations for communicating scientific research. One of the remarkable feature which makes blender easy to use is its user interface. This is the screen that you see when you start Blender. It is user-friendly and well organized. What I love the most about blenders UI is it's working space. You have ample space to work on your 3D models and animations. What makes blender even more unique compared to other 3D programs is its community. There are so many people who use Blender for various purposes. Many are part of its development. Being a free software. People love supporting each other by sharing information on how to use Blender. There are good learning resources available online made by the community. Not only that, there are forums where you can post questions. If you have any problems. While using blender, you will get the solution within few minutes. Recently, Blender got a big update. It was updated with the real-time rendering engine called EV, which makes the rendering much faster than cycles. Ev will help you to render high resolution illustrations in few seconds to minutes. Another way Blender will be useful for you is to make animations. Using animations is a great way to explain mechanisms and structural formations, et cetera. You can use them in your presentations and social media. Not only that, while you submit your research paper, journals, ask if you have any multimedia files as supporting information with your research paper. If needed, there you can submit animations for better reach for your research. Many companies like Microsoft, Google, indel, Ubisoft, Facebook, Nvidia are supporting blender. This means you can expect more refined versions of Blender in the future. The team led by Dr. Graham Johnson at the University of California even developed an add-on for Blender called EPM V, which specifically focuses on the visualization of proteins. Other structures related to cell biology. We can surely expect more updates on using Blender for scientific visualizations. In future. In this workshop, our focus will be on using Blender for making 3D illustrations. I will show you all the principles, tools, and techniques you need to create any 3D illustrations in science communication, clarity is the key to success. If an image can speak thousand words, you better to have good images in your writing and presentations. Learning Blender is the right step you can take to become a successful science communicator. 2. Fundamentals of Blender: Hi, welcome to the Fundamentals of Blender. This video will explain everything that you should be knowing to start using Blender. This is the screen that you will see when you open Blender. You can see that the version right now we are using is 2.93. You can download the latest version from blenders website. The link is given in the description. Alright? Okay, so we have a cube here. They have a camera here. We have a lamp here. You can see a cube here. If you left-click on the cube, you can select object. And just like that, you can select anything with a left-click. If you click outside, you can unselect the object. You can see that there is an x-axis and a y-axis. Let's move this cube before that, if you use mouse scroll wheel in and out, you can zoom in and zoom out. Let me zoom in a little bit. I'm selecting this cube. You can see there is a move to here. Grows arrow, icon. You can select that. Now you can see that there are three axis. Green axis represents y-axis, blue represent z axis. You can see that here as well. This is called dismal. Right-click on y-axis and hold and move the mouse. You can move objects like this. Similarly, I can move in other axis as well. So the shortcut for moving objects is D. If I press Z and move, I can move objects like this. If I want to move object along y-axis, I have to type the axis just followed by d phi d x. I can move objects along x axis. So next option is rotate. You can rotate objects along different axes. You can see that our wheels, if you click on this Greenville and rotate, you can see that the object is getting rotated along y-axis. If you click on this, you can rotate along x axis, just like that. Okay? The next option is scale view. Click on this scale. You can see that at different type of axis is shown. If you click on this green one and move like this, you can scale the object. And if you click on this red axis, can scale along x axis. So for scaling, shortcut is, you can scale like this. For scaling along y-axis, I have two plus y and move the white board. So we have seen how to rotate. If you want to rotate, how to press R, and you can rotate like this. Control Z for going back. Like in other softwares. If I want to rotate along x-axis, I have to press R x and rotate like this. If you want to rotate the view, you can click the central mouse button, hold the button and move the most so that you can rotate the view like this. Any object like this. Cube, spheres, icosahedron, cylinder, etc, are called mesh. So let me explain that in detail. So if you look here, you can see that there are four different options. Plus one is wireframe mode. Click on that. You can see that this is a wireframe of the cube. If you click on the next option, can see the box. You can see that there is an option here to add materials in 2D, we use colors for any shapes and drawing. In 3D, we create materials instead of colors. We give blue material, green material, read material like that. If you click here, you can see that it has a material by default, you can see here a material. You can change the base color by clicking here and move this. Now you cannot see the material it is because you have to activate material preview here. If you just keep the mouse on any menu, text box will appear. It will explain what it is used before. Click on that. Now you can see that it is a red balls. And the next option is called splendor. So if you click on that, now you can see that there is a light casting on the cube and there is shallow here, right? This is how you will get the final image out of blender that you can see through this render preview. Alright, so let me go back to solid. Review this one. Now let's have a look how this cube is. Click on this tool. Right now, this is in object mode. You can see here there are different modes. If you want to make any changes to this mesh, you had to go to Edit Mode that you can go by clicking on Edit Mode here. Or I can press Tab to go to Edit Mode. You can see various options to motivate this cube. We can see three arrows here. Right now. It is in vertex select mode. Now you can see that this particular cube is made up of eight different vertexes. You can see that in detail if you go to wireframe mode here, you can click individual texts like this. You can also move the vertex. If you choose this move tool like this. The next option is to select them all. Click on that. Now you can select edges of the box, right? And you can modify that as well. So you will get different shapes like this. And the third one is face select mode. Now you can select faces. If I move the face like this, you get different shapes. Let me go back and rows. We can see all the buttons and mouse clicks that I'm doing here. If you are getting confused. For example, if I press space-bar, you can see spacebar here. Alright? So these are the three Selection Mode, vertex selection for vertexes and select four edges and face select four phases. There are different options to change the shape of this mesh. You can see extrude, option, extrude region. Now, if you move this plus icon, you can extrude out of the cube like this. Alright? Right now it doesn't face select mode. That is why I'm able to exclude late this. Right? So while extruding, I can scale the face S1. If I press S and scale. You can scale things like this. Alright? This is how you model things. The process of creating these models is called modelling. Next, let's have a look at the other option. There is an option called inset faces. If you click on that, if you click on this yellow dot and move towards the face, you can see that an inset faces for me, right? So if you extrude that, you can see that this formula like this, I can make an insert again and x2 again. You have to make sure that you are in edit mode. So there are other options as well. You can have a look at those, what they are doing. Some tools are four different selections. So for this particular example called B, well, you have to go to Edit Select mode to use that, select candidates. And you can see that it is getting better. Right? Let me show you. Select here and few more here. You can see that what it is happening. Okay, let me go back. I'll delete this. I'll add a new cube by pressing Shift a. You can see mesh here. Cube here. Let me go back to edit mode. By pressing Tab. You can have a look at other options which are used for modeling light. Whenever you want to add new measures, you can press Shift a. You can go to Mesh that have different cylinder, cone, UV, sphere, plane, et cetera. There are other options as well. And you can see that there are different tabs here for modelling. You can click go to modeling panel. By clicking here, you can go to sculpting. Sculpting is where you sculpt things out. Like this example. You model things like clay, right? The mesh will behave like the next two are nice. Uv Editing. It is for advanced sharing options and texture pane. You can, you can paint on measures. There is shading option. You can create any materials you want. Animation, rendering, compositing. There are several options, even video editing, 2D animation. All kinds of possibilities. Let's go back to Layout. Let me undo this Control Z. Okay? The next one is modifiers. You can see. Modifier menu here. This called modifier properties. If I click that, there is a drop-down menu called add modifier. You can see a variety of modifiers. For example, first two and if I, Jews are a modifier and change properties here, we can see that it is forming an array. If I add that again, you can see that this getting duplicated. So this is how you create advanced structures like DNA, molecular assembly, liquid bi-layer, cetera. If you click on this and choose for example, CO2 subdivision surface modifier, it basically small, dense the mesh. You can increase the levels. Here. Now you can see that the cube is forming a sphere. So there is a wireframe modifier. It shows the wireframe of the cube. If I increase the thickness, you can see that this forming beaker and you can change properties here. So this is an important tab. This is how the magic happens. There are several different options. Using this, you can do animations, advanced animations, all sorts of things. Learning and getting a grasp of all these modifiers will take time. So we will be using modifiers in all our projects. Okay, so let's talk about camera. If you click on this camera, you can move the camera like this. If you click 0, we can see what camera is seeing. This is, this will be our final output of the image. If you click on this render preview, we can see that the cube is there and light is getting reflected, things like that. If you click on this camera option here, and you can see a render engine. Mainly there are two render engines. One is called EV, The second one is cypress, even gives fast rendered images cycles we will take time cycles, will give you photorealistic images. We will give more cartoonish illustration kind of image. We will be using this more often. And you can see there is a bloom option. Does, it gives a glow. Let me show you if I click on this late and go to Properties. You can see all the properties of late. If you click here, let me change the color of the Lamb to read, we can see the reflection is getting changed to red. If I increase the power of the lamp to 6 thousand, you can see that there is a glow on the cube. If you click on rental properties and uncheck blue, that glow will go. There are different other options. If you click on camera and go to camera properties, you can see properties of camera and depth of field and other options. If you go to Viewport Display and click on this drop-down arrow near composition guides. You can click on this. And if you look through the camera now, you can see that there are lines which represents rule of third. So all these four points, our main area of focus in any major new combos. An illustration, if you press 0 again, you will go the camera view. If you want to add materials to this cube, you can go to material properties. Add new material. Here you can change all the properties of the material. If I change the color of the material, let me change the color of the lamp back to white. There are several properties. If you change these properties, the behavior of this material to isolate it will change. The look and feel of the material will change. You can create any realistic materials that you can imagine by changing all the properties and adding some other options called the nose, etc. If you increase metallic, you can see that it is becoming metallic. So it is not visible much here. So let's delete this cube and add a ecosphere. You can change the properties of ecosphere here. If you increase the subdivision, it will become smoke. Right? This is fine. Right now you can see this grid length. Click on that and right-click Shade Smooth, that lines will disappear. Let's go back to materials. Let me add a material here. And let's go to Render View. I will change the base color to red. And if you change the metallic properties, we can see that it appears as a metallic ball. Change this back to yellow. You can see it is behaving as a golden sphere. So you can duplicate any object by clicking on that and press shift D. I'll duplicate this layer by pressing Shift D and move towards this direction. Now you can see that the light is getting reflected on top of the sphere. According to 3 lighting. You can keep a lamp here. With less power. You can keep a lamp the opposite direction of the camera. With high-intensity. If I look through the camera, you have a nice lighting on the sphere. I'll pick on this stuff. If you change other properties like subsurface, you can see that it is behaving like skin texture. Light is entering inside the material and getting scattered, became like organic texture. Me go back and you can experiment with all other properties. Play reduce roughness. More light will be reflected. If I increase roughness, it will appear as a rough surface. And I can add light emission to this by changing this emission to blue. For example, light is getting amateur. If I increase the intensity to, for example, you can see that more light is coming out. So that's how you add materials. If you want some advanced artistic materials, you have to go here and go to shader editor. And if you scroll in, you can zoom in. You can see two nodes. So this is the final output. So this is the properties. All the properties are connected to the final output. I can add more properties here and connect to this as input. If I press Shift a, for example, add color mixed RGB node here, and connect that color to this base color. And add one more node called texture, shift a texture. Voronoi connect this, dispense output FAQ on output here. And click on this color one, choose one color, and click on this color to choose second color. You can see at texts there is forming on the surface of the sphere. Right now. If you change the properties, you can change the texture. There are, if you press Shift a, you can see several options. By connecting. Or those systematically, you can create any type of material you want. Now, you can see a outliner window here. You can see all the objects within the scene here, you can select it by clicking on the object you want. You can put a set of objects, objects into collections. All these objects are in one collection. If I add new collection by clicking here, I have new collection here. For example, if I click on this ecosphere and click on this icon, duty not be visible here. If I click on this camera icon, it will not be visible in the final render image. Right now I activate those two and back. Let me draw a couple of things about lights. We have 3 lights here. If you click on one light and go to light properties, you can see that there are options to change this lamp to Adrian and now it is an area lamb. If I increase the size, you can see properly. Now this is an area length, like a light panel. It is casting light in this direction. Let me change this also in a GLM. Now it is lighting in this direction. I can rotate that by pressing R, rotate that along y-axis here by pressing R, Why? Like that. And along z axis, like this. And move a little bit. Now it is casting light here. It may increase the size of the light here. Okay, Now, if I look through the camera, you can see that the backlight is forming a white edge around the border. So I reduce the intensity little bit back to them. I think that is too much. Let's choose 3 thousand. And you can save this file by going to File Save As. And you can import any new object by going into embodied. There are different file format options to add images as planes, x, 3D, protein, data bank, etc. Blender was developed by so many people. So some people will develop some add-ons and extra feature to blend them on their own. Few of them are integral part of the blender, which you can activate by going to the preferences menu. By clicking here, go to Preferences and click on Add-ons. You can see several. The extra add-ons that you can activate by clicking like this. Okay, let me go back to three 3D view port. Now how to take final output from blender? You can do by going to render render image. So we have an image here. You can save that by going to Image, Save As the stop. My first two. Okay? Now here is my image on the desktop. Now you can see the image has come out nicely, but it has a gray background that you can remove. By going back to Blender Render properties. At the bottom you have an option called refilling. Click on this drop-down arrow and check this transparent. Now, the background has worn. Whenever you want to make a 3D image like this, for example, molecular assembly or some bioelectrical structure. You may not want to have any background. You want to choose this image assets in PowerPoint or Word document. So this will be a useful feature. Now if you render, you can see that there is no background. You can save this. Right now you are looking through the camera. If I zoom in and out by using the scroll wheel, you can see that the camera is moving along. I can freeze that at that position by going here and clicking on this view by taking this camera to view. Alright. So another point about camera is you can change the render engine from the V2, cycles it so it will be lit with slower cycles. Work on the principle like it is calculating each rays of light is traveling through the scene and how it is bouncing off of the surface of the object and how it is getting reflected and all those calculations are being carried out. So that's why you can see that all these light dots are appearing slowly. But EVs calculated in real time. It is not a realistic calculation, but it is a more kind of catatonic style illustration. We will be using that for us most of the time. One of the happy thing about EVs, it is much, much, much faster than say, Okay, that's all. If you click on an object, there is an arrow here. If you go to Item, you can see all the properties here, but you can change the location like this as well. If you click on one x value and more, most right and left, you can change the position like this, just like that. And you can change the scale also like this. And you can see interpretation also here. So all the basic features of Blender we have covered, I think that's enough for you to get started. So now you know how to add objects in the scene, how to put to model things. And now you know how to add materials and how to change your views, how to change the render engine, how to change the location, rotation scale, how to make adventure materials, how to take output, final rendered output. Alright, so that's all. You can start your first project. Thank you for following along this much. I wish you all the best. 3. SARS CoV 2: Hi, Welcome to your first project. In this tutorial, you will be making 3D model of sars CoV-2, the corona virus particle. Before we start modelling coronavirus, we know that virus has spike proteins on the surface. How can we get the 3D model of the spike protein? Let me introduce Protein Data Bank, the open access Protein Data Bank, BBB serves as the single repository for 3D structural data of proteins, DNA, RNA and their complexes with small molecules. This is how PDB will be useful for us in simple language. When a lab finds the structure of a protein, they will be publishing the structure on PDB, which you can download as PDB file, which can be imported to any 3D programs. In our case, we'll be using Blender. We can open the PDB file in camera and modify according to our needs. And then export file from camera and import that into Blender. Alright, so this is the website which is called Protein Data Bank. You can see the utterances are CSB.org. For every protein, there will be a code which is called PDB ID. For example, you can see that there is a molecule highlighted here as molecule of the month. If you click on that, you can see that there is an entity called PDB ID. So this is the ID we will be using to import proteins in camera. Here is an article from PDB which discusses the spike protein and a receptor protein in which the spike protein goes and binds to. So if you are dealing with some proteins that you are interested in or you are working on, you will be getting the PDB id from the research paper related to that. You can have a look at the supporting information, et cetera. So it will be definitely mentioned in that pepper. This article talks about sars CoV-2 spike protein in detail. You can see the PDB entries are listed here. So we can click on that. So you can see structure of the sars CoV-2 spike glycoprotein. So all we want is this code is six. So we have a reference image here. We have a virus particle and a virus particle which shows the cross-section where RNAs shrunk. Post-reform lips open Camera. Go to File, fetch by ID and type that PDB ID here, six, VII, IX, X, and click on Fetch. We can see that for tin is going on, that data is being downloaded from the PDB website all at how beautiful is this? This have a look. You have the 3D structure of the protein here. So v1 surface structure of this protein go to Tools, higher-order structure multi-scale models. And here you can change the resolution to four and click on make models. So we have a surface representation of the protein. So right now we can export this structure. Go to File Export scene and change the file type to colab dot d a plus two ion bike protein. And I will say in the drape, say, right now, we can go to Blender. So now what I'll do, I'll import that structure inside Blender or delete the default cube. Always remember to save the file when you're working in Blender. Go to File. So as you can see, whatever keys that I'm pressing here, if I am pressing V, You can see that whatever I'm doing with the mouse as well as keyboard, you can see here, if you get confused, anywhere, which key I did press. Okay, I'll delete the default cube. Now, we will embed that protein structure. Go to File Import collateral. Go to where did you save the protein? Spike, protein dot da in bold color. So now the structure is so big. You have to zoom out a little bit by scrolling. Most will back. You can see that the structure is here. Alright. So beautiful. So what I'll do next, reduce the size of the protein is now too big. I will click and drag, select the protein and press S and move the mouse button like this so that it will be scaled down. Now the size is small, which we can handle relatively easily. I'll scale it down again and move them all straight. Now we can see our camera in late this year. So the protein is in the field. So I'll save control S. Now you can see that the protein has imported as separate domains. So what I will do, I will join them together, click and drag, select plus shift, and click on one protein domain like this. Now you can see that it has a selection press Control J or Control J, so that it will be joined. Now, if you click and move this by using Move tool, here is the axis. You can move wherever you want. So V1, the axis to be at the base of the protein. So we will be placing this protein on top of a sphere. So we want the origin of the protein at the base of the protein. So what we will do here is I can call the cursor, click on that. So you can move cursor like this. Click at the bottom of the protein like this. Now, what you have to do, go back and click on select box. Right-click on protein, go to set origin, origin to 3D cursor. Right now we will be moving the origin to 3D cursor that we have placed at the bottom of the protein. That now if you select on the protein and click on Move tool, you can see the origin has more at the base of the protein. Okay, I'll move this side. Now we will add a sphere, a mesh UV sphere. Okay? Next we will add a particle system. You can see here there is a particle system. Go there and click on this plus icon. And V1 hair particle system or light. So the basic idea is when you click on this hair, you can see hair lines going from the surface of the sphere. So we will replace all those hair lines with our protein. That is a main idea. So right now the number of the hair, you can adjust here. I will change that to 50. And you can change the length of the hair. I will change that to one. Now, if you go down and go here at the render, you can click on this drop-down arrow. There you can see a render S change that from part two object. Now, there is an next option called instance object. There is an eyedropper tool. Click on that eyedropper tool and click on this object. Right. Now you can see that all those proteins are on the surface of the sphere. So now it is more, we can increase the size by increasing the hair length like this. Okay? So what we have done, we have replaced all those hair with an instance object here, which we chose with the eyedropper tool. And all those higher pair particles were replaced. Now, we want all those particles to stand but perpendicular to the surface of the sphere. For that, you have to check this object rotation. Now what just happened if you go to wireframe mode, you can see that all the proteins has gone inside. We want all of them to come outside, right? So whatever changes we make on this protein will be replicated there as well, right? So what you can do, go to edit mode by pressing tab and go to wireframe mode. Click here. Or if you press Z and you can choose wireframe here, or you can click here. Now I want to go to top view by pressing F7. Or you can go to View, view, Viewport. Okay. Now we know that our origin is here. We can see a yellow dot. With respect to that origin. This particle is being replicated on top of the sphere. By just rotating the whole sphere around that origin. We can solve the issue. So drag select this mesh like this. Now go to this Rotate tool and rotate along X6 like this. In 90-degree. Right? Note the origin is here. If you press D, you can move the protein like this. You can place like this, or you can move with this, move toward more like this. And if you zoom out, you can see the magic happen. If you press tab, you will be going back to object mode. Go to Viewport Shading mode by clicking here or Z and click on Solid. Okay, That's all. We have a virus particle. If you click on this fear and right-click and click on Shade Smooth, all these lines will disappear. Now we have a smooth virus particle or light. And if you want to increase the size of the particle, you can click on this virus and go here and change the number. Like this. I will choose Sandy. And you can change the size by adjusting the hair length, etcetera. All right. So that's all. And what we will be doing next is we'll move this protein to a side. We'll color this protein. Click on this protein, go to Material tab. We have a material already clicked. Change the base color from white to maybe read. You can go to material preview or change material preview. This is the easiest way to do. Then you can, by holding z, you can change from Brenda review material view, wireframe view or solid view. So this is the easiest workflow. So you can go to material preview right now so that we can see the color of the material. Okay, so I'll add a color to the virus shell as well. Add a new material, change the base color too. Okay. So now you can move this protein to side. Now what we'll do, we want to show the cross section also, right? You see here, you can see a cross-section for that. What we have to do click on this virus particle. Go to side view by going here, view, Viewport. Left. Now we are viewing from the side. If you want to ban the view, you can go here. You can see an a hand click on that hold and move the mouse. Then you can move the view like this. Alright? Or otherwise there is a shortcut. You can press shift and central most button. That is the shortcut. Okay, so now we want to cut this much from the sphere. So now we'll cut the one by fourth of the sphere. Before that, we will duplicate this virus particle to show the virus particle by clicking Shift D and move the mouse to the side. So now you have one more virus particle, which we don't make any changes. So we'll work on this, click on this, go to edit mode by pressing tab. Whenever you want to make a change dimensions, you have to go to edit mode by pressing Tab. Or you can go here, object mode, or you can change that to plus ab. You can go to wireframe mode by clicking here or pressing Z. Then choosing wireframe mode, I'll zoom a little bit so that you will have a better view. Okay? So now click and drag select, like this. Okay? So I'll repeat again. You can see a horizontal center line and a vertical center line. I will select the point just above the horizontal lines, just to the right of the vertical center line. So click and drag, select this. And now you have selected all this red vertex points. Click X. Jews were pieces. So you will delete all those points. So if you go back to object mode by pressing tab, you can change the viewport. Viewport shading. Now you can see a cross-section of the virus. Now, let's look through the camera by pressing 0. I'll zoom in a little bit by scroll wheel. Now, I want to freeze the view of the camera in that angle. For that, I will go here in this small arrow. Click on that. You'll get the open menu like this. Go to View, camera to view under view look. Now, if even if you zoom in and zoom out, the camera view will be remain constant that okay, now I'll click on this cross section of the virus and rotate along z. The exits are here. And choose this virus, full virus particle and move along the y-axis. And move this just to the right. If you want, move very quickly, you can press Z and you can move like this again, plus D and move this. Okay, I'll save the file control tests. Now what we want is an RNA strand that you have to activate an add-on, right? If you go here in this drop-down menu, you can see preferences. And if you type extra in this search bar, you can see two add-ons. You have to activate both of them by checking these two. Alright? So you can add several kinds of meshes and objects in Blender. So let's go back to our 3D view port by clicking on this gear icon. Now, if you press Shift a and go to curves, you can see profits. There. You have to choose torus or light. Now, you should not click or change anything. What do you have to do without doing anything? You can see a small menu here. Click on this drop up arrow. You can see a big menu here. What you have to do right now is if you change the settings, you can see the changes. Night. So if you increase the number of turns, you can see that it is forming a spiral structure. Don't click anywhere. If you click, you won't be able to make any changes. From that. If you increase the height per cycle, you can see that it is moving up and down. So you can increase the height a little bit. And you can increase the steps. And you can increase the soil in Greece. Number of cycles like this. Okay? You can see an option of increase of radius if you change that, you can see that it is changing like this. I'll reduce the inner radius like this. Yeah, this is fine. Now you can click here and go back to object mode by pressing Tab. Now you have RNA lake structure. If you see here, you can make changes here. Object Data Properties go to geometry. And there is an option called depth. If you increase in depth, you can see that is forming a tube-like structure. This is our RNA. Let's add a new material to that, go to material properties, click New, and change that to yellow with the material. You can see that. So you can move this to the inside of the wireless. Scale it down by pressing S and moving the mouse. Now, let's look through the camera by pressing 0. More. The bottleneck. Don't scale up a little bit. Now on this is let's say the file Control S. Let's go to Render View. By clicking, these are rendered. All right. If you render this image, this is what you will get. Okay? So let's give good background. What you can do is go to this predictive type menu. Click on that, go to shader editor. So right now it is on the object. We want to change the world, the surroundings around these objects so that we will have a background color. Go to Object, check world. And plus Shift a. Go to color, mix RGB. Connect this color to color. And press Shift a again, go to texture, choose water-in-oil texture. Connect this distance to this FAQ input, FAC, choose two colors by clicking on color one. And choose this can work color by clicking on color. Okay, Now you have a beautiful background. You can adjust the texture by changing the scale and all this. And to increase the strength, you will become by, I'll go with one. Now what I'll do, I'll duplicate this virus in the background by pressing Shift D. I'll move this to the back. Or you can change the position by going to Item and change location here. Right-click and drag right, ten left. So that will be changing. This is a little bit easier. So I'll change like this. I didn't duplicate again. And more by pressing Shift D. Add one more there and duplicate again on more. Duplicate again one year. And I think that is fine. I think I can add one more here. More. This to the back. No, it's this one. I will add one more here by pressing Shift D. Yeah, this is fine. So in the next step is adding depth of fields. The viruses in the background will be out-of-focus. For that, what you can do, click on our camera here on the border. So the camera is selected. You can see the camera receptor or you can click the camera icon here. Go to depth of field here in the camera properties. Check this depth of field and click on this drop-down arrow. And you have to choose a focus object. Click on this Eyedropper tool and click this fear. Now the camera will be focusing on this virus particles since this virus, but the virus is also in the same line. So this area will be in focus. So you can change the f-stop value 2.2. You can see that all the particles in the background is blurred. You can choose 0.34.054, extreme focus. It's up to you. I will go with 0.25. Okay. I'll press Save. Now you can add more lights in the scene. I have one lamb here. I'll change that from sport to a lamp, and I'll increase the size of the lamp. Now it is going in this direction. You can change that by rotating the lamp plus r, like this. Now our camera is here. You can move this in this direction. Now, it is good to go, go back to camera view by pressing. Now, this is ready to render. We can increase the brightness of the light if you want. I'll go with 1300. Go back to camera view. I'll save that file. That's all. So now this is ready to render. You can go to Render and press Render image, zoom out. You can go to Image. Save As. That's all. Now you have an illustration of COVID virus particles. You can open this image and see how it looks. It looks nice. You can modify this image if you want in power, open Photoshop or GIMP, you can increase the brightness and adjust the contracts, et cetera. You can change in Windows by going to Edit and create, to Edit, and go to adjustments. I'll increase the light a little bit. In Greece, the color edit with that contrast will be higher. That's all. This is the final illustration. This is all yours. So I hope you learned how to import protein structures inside Blender, how to use particle system, how to generate helical shape, how to use Depth of Field, how to add materials, how to add color to the background, alright? And how to save the file. You have any doubt you can ask. So share your work. That's all. See you in the next tutorial. 4. Nanoparticle: All right, In this tutorial, we will be making 3D structure of a gold nanoparticle. You can see here a microscopic image of nanoparticles. If you look closer, you can see that this nanoparticle is made up of uniform arrangement of gold nanoparticles in there lattice. Let me show you a research paper which discuss the shape and structure of gold nanoparticle. You can clearly see different shapes of gold nanoparticle here. We will be making the exact structure that you are seeing here. Let me quickly show you what is the idea that we will be using to create this 3D structure? First of all, we'll be adding a sphere and a particle system to that sphere. If we put the velocity of the emitting particles to 0 and gravity in the scene 0, all the particles will remain on the surface itself. Not only that, we want all the particles to emit from the volume of the sphere. There is a property called grid, which will make sure that all the particles are uniformly arranged within the sphere, like this. Now we will add one more sphere in the scene with a golden color. And we will replace this article points in this gold atom. So all these points will be replaced with the gold atoms and you will get enough gold nanoparticle. You will be using the same technique for a lot of different applications. So let's go to Blender and make the 3D structure. This is very easy to do. So let's open Blender. I'm deleting this default cube and adding UV sphere by pressing Shift a and zooming in a little bit. Adding a particle system by going here. And click this plus icon and change the velocity of the particles from one to 0. And we want all the particles to start emitting from frame 0 and end in the frame zeros so that the oil particles will be present at a moment. Now go to Scene properties and uncheck gravity. So we don't have gravity in the scene. Now you can see that all the particles are emitting from the face of the parent sphere. So we want all the particles to emit from the volume of the sphere. So go to particle properties. Hearing so Source drop-down. You can see that image from change that from phases to volume. And if you go to wireframe mode, you can see that all the particles are remaining inside the sphere. If you change the distribution from two good, You can see that all the particles are in ordered arrangement. If you look here, you can see that the particles are arranged like an hexagonal. Good fashion. So you can change that here by taking hexagonal grid. Now the particles are arranged more correctly. If you change the resolution here, you can add more particles. So let me add a gold atom by adding a fear UV sphere and adding a material to that. And taking the base color here to yellow. Let me go to Viewport Shading you. And let me add a little bit metallic properties by changing the metallic value 2.8. You can see that this looks more metallic. Let me change it to 0.9 and reduce the roughness a little bit, 2.2. Now it is more metallic. More roughness means less light will be reflected. The metal has a property where it reflects light comparatively more than a rough surface. So I want this sphere to be smooth shaded. So right-click on that. Shade, Smooth, Smooth. Let me move this particularly to side. So right now we want all this particle points to replace it with this gold atom. So click on this sphere, would do particle properties. And there will be a render properties. And change a render as from hallowed to object. And choose which object you want to want the particle points to be replaced with. Here you can see instance object. Click on this Eyedropper tool and click on this sphere like that. So now you have an antibiotic. So you can remove this parent fear in the viewport or final render by going to hear in the render you can uncheck. In particle properties. In render you can uncheck Show EBITDA. And also in Viewport Display. You can uncheck Show emitter that. So now you have a nanoparticle. If you look through the camera by pressing 0, can see the nanoparticle. So let me change the orientation a little bit. This looks okay. I want to add more particles. By increasing resolution. You can do that. Maybe can define, We'll be fine. Right now when I'm zooming in and out by using the scroll button, you can see that the camera view also is moving along. I want the camera view to be free, frozen there. So for that, you have to go to View and check this log to camera two view. Now, if you zoom in and out, the camera view will be remaining there. So now you can adjust the final angle of rendering as you'd like. So if you go to rendered view and this point, light a lamp and it may increase the size a little bit. All right, looking good. I'm changing the angle of the light and moving it to a little bit closer here. And I'm increasing the power of the lamp to 2 thousand. And I'm duplicating that lamp by pressing Shift D and protecting the lamb towards the particles direction and changing the intensity to 300. Now, if I look through the camera, I haven't, but the lighting industry, now you can bundle the final image by going to Properties and go to fill him. Check transparent so that you will not be having any transparent background. Click Render. Now you can save this image by going to Image, Save As this dog. Okay? So now in the desktop, you have an image of an antibiotic. 5. Molecule: Hi, welcome back to a new project. In this tutorial, we'll make a three-dimensional structure of a molecule. How can we create a three-dimensional illustration of any molecule? We will learn how you can create the three-dimensional structure. How can you import that structure into Blender and create an illustration? You can see an example here. This is a cupboard published in chemistry, a European Journal. So I use the same technique to create this three-dimensional structure of these molecules. Here you can see these are forming an ion channel on the surface of cancer cells, which is acting as an entry passage for ions. So once you create this structure, you can import into Blender and you can modify. This will be useful in so many places. You can see that these are some other comrades. I have used the same technique here, here, here, here, here. So this will allow you to import any chemical structure into Blender. This is another example where interaction of ligand molecules on the surface of a silicon nanoparticle is depicted. You can see 3D structure of a ligand molecule here. And it is forming bonds on the surface of a silicon nanoparticles. How you can make this nanoparticle that you can follow the, another project which discusses in detail how you can create the 3D structure of a nanoparticle. How can you create this three-dimensional structure of a molecule that will do right now or wait, for this, we will use a software called Avogadro. I'll put the link to download the software in the description. You can have a look. Alright, so let's go to our guard row. So in Avogadro, here you can see draw settings. There is an option called elements. By noticing carbon here you can choose whichever element you want. Right now, I'll go with the carbon. So if you click here, you will get their carbon with four hydrogens attached to that. And click on that carbon and drag out. Okay, so you'll get there. And another carbon, which is making a bond to that carbon. So I can click on this sphere and drag out. Alright, I'll repeat that again. So I have butane here by one to another atom, for example, oxygen. It can choose oxygen here and click on this carbon and drag out. I have an OH here. So you can see that the structure is correct, but the confirmation and orientations are wrong, which some bones or lengthier and some are smaller. So we have to optimize the structure according to the NLG. The bonding, bonding energy repulsion, all those things will be calculated and we will get optimized structure. So for that you can see a small icon with an E, which is called auto optimization tool. Click on that and go down here and click Start. Now you can see that the structure is getting optimized. You can see energy calculation is going on. All right. So if you rotate this, yeah. That's all. That's how you create a structure. So one more method that I will show you. If you know the name of the molecule, you can just create the 3D structure of the molecule without any effort. I'll close this, whatever we have built so far, discard to File Import, fetched by chemical name or light. So I'll type one random molecule. Maybe, buy it down more. So make sure you have internet connection. And now you have the structure of paracetamol here. And if you go to build, you can see other options to build DNA, RNA updates, et cetera. You can explore that as well. And it is a nanotube builder as well. You can build nanotubes of graphemes, a carbon nanotube, et cetera. And there are other options to explore. You can have a look. So let's export this 3D structure and go to File. Export, VRML, click Select, and type safe. And you have to click Render. The file will be available in desktop. Let's go back to Blender. Go to File Import exe 3D, extensible 3D. You can see here in bracket dot w Econ that in desktop we have paracetamol dot WL, double-click. We have the 3D structure. All right, that's all. We can create. Any 3D structure like this. You just have to create the structure and optimize the structure by clicking that E Aiken and like this. You can also save the structures as PDB by going, go to Save As and choose PDB also. But in PDB, one problem is you won't be getting double bonds. You can try in boating VDB as well. So we'll go with the dot WAR file. For right now. We have our structure double bond. Everything is available but the colors are not there. We have to add colors to all atoms. Now we can add color to these objects. So let's click on a carbon atom, go to material properties, add a color. Let's choose black. If you go to material preview here, you can see the colors. So let's name this material as car, but OK. And click on others views and twos carbon. So this is an oxygen atom. So we can color it red. And one more oxygen atom. So this is a nitrogen atom. We can add a new material and change it to blue. And let's call it. So you can color all these bonds and hydrogens if you want. Right now, I'm happy with this. So if I look through the camera by pressing 0, can see the molecule. I will lock the view of the camera by going to View, Lock camera view, zooming and go to rendered view. Add a light so that we can see the structure. So I'll scale this light here. Alm. I will move this up and increase the size a little bit more so that it covers than the molecule. So in Greece the power to send maybe 2017. Okay. We look through the camera so you can see clearly the molecule is visible. So right now you can see that there are grid lines visible on these fears. So you can select all these shapes together and right-click and choose Shade Smooth. Now, all those grid lines are gone and the structure is more smooth. If you want add, you can adjust the light team. I will duplicate one more light here and move and rotate along x axis like this. So we have one more light coming from the front. So one interesting thing you can keep in mind is if you change the color of this light like this, you can change the view of the molecule like this if you want to add some artistic effect, right? So I'll choose a little bit yellow. So for this slide, I can choose a little bit blue. So you can see that there is a different shading to the molecule. So let's render this image. Go to Render properties. Go to fill in and choose transparent so we will not have any background to the image, will get a PNG image without any background. Check this. So I'll keep this lights back to white. I'll show you what I'm going to do. Let's render this image. You can save this image, the desktop. So one thing you can do is if you change this or colors back to white. I'm choosing the carbon and change the base color to white and changing the blue color to white. Now, if you change the color of this light to blue, now you can see that in drastic effects are coming. See this is becoming blue. That's quite interesting. I can make this yellow. Whatever you'd like. I will keep it the right way to front. Now you can, if you want to increase the shade of this blue, you can increase the intensity of the light. So if I duplicate this slide one more time, see I'm choosing yellow. Now we have an interesting shading going on. You have a red color coming from here. You have a blue color coming from a bot. You have a yellow color coming from the side and there is some mixing happening. This is one way to generate interesting images by mixing different colors of light. You can turn this e-mail as well. So one more thing you can add is to create outlines to all these shapes. So for that you can go to Render properties, check this freestyle option, and change some settings here as well. Go to View layer properties. And if you go down you can see all the fleece Tell settings where you can adjust the boundary, outlines, shading lines. So right now we want only going to click Condor, uncheck border, silhouette, and Greece. Now click Render. Now if you zoom in, you can see there is an outline to the molecule. If you want, you can increase the width of this line by going back to render properties. And click on this drop-down arrow. Nearer, please tell and change this line thickness to render again. Alright, you have a thick boundary. You can save this. Save as desktop. Now you have two images of Paris tomorrow, another stove that you can use for water. This is a nice image. Okay? Okay, That's all in this tutorial. All right. 6. WBC: Hi. In this tutorial, we'll be making a three-dimensional structure of a macrophage. Macrophages are a type of white blood cell which angles a foreign body, for example, a bacteria. It will open up, it's like structure, which is called pseudopods. So we will make the illustration which depicts this process. For this, we'll be using sculpting. Sculpting is like modelling with eclectic. Here you can see an illustration which depicts what I just described. And we have a macrophage here. It has appendages like structures. And there is a cancer cell in which it trying to engulf. Once it goes inside the macrophage, it will get hydrolyzed and destroyed. So let's go to Blender. So I'm deleting this default cube. And let's add a ecosphere, shift a mesh I ecosphere. And you can see that there is a small tab here. It will add two sphere. Just click on this arrow. And you can increase the subdivision here from two to four is fine. So once that is done, Let's go back to our reference image. You can see that it was made from a spherical structure. There are small protruding structures on the surface of that sphere. And if you look closely, you can see that on the surface itself there are deformations like we, like. It's not uniform sphere, it is like there is a texture to the surface. So we will add that texture by displacement modifier. Let's go back to Blender and click on the Here. And here you can go to modify properties and add a displacement modifier. And click on New, so that you can add that texture that you will, you will be using to deform the surface. Click on New. And at the bottom you have texture properties. You have to choose the texture there. So click here and you can go to Type and click on clouds. So what just happened is you can see a texture here with a lot of white and gray colors. Those are certain values. Those values are guiding how this mesh to be deformed. You can see that this mesh is deforming like this. So you can see that it is not smooth. So let's go to Modify tab and add a subdivision surface modifier. So now it is smooth. If you right-click on Mesh and click on Shade Smooth, it will become smooth surfaced object. So you have a macrophage structure here. So I want to reduce the surface deformation little bit so you can go to strength and make it 2.8. Reduce a little bit more, 0.45. Yeah, that is fine. Before we start sculpting, we have to apply these modifiers. You have to apply the displacement modifier first, Play and subdivision modifier second, if you click here in this drop-down arrow, you have to click Apply. All right, so now we are good to go to cultic. You can see several tabs on the top. Click on sculpting. Before you start sculpting, one thing you should keep in mind is you have to check this dynode TOPO, which is called dynamic topology, why it is needed. You can choose this tool called snake hook. If you click and drag on the surface, you can see that the surfacing sees getting deform, but it is not smooth. So if you go to wireframe mode, you can see that what is happening. So the vertexes are getting pulled out and the surface is getting deformed. So if we want to, the surface, get pulled out smoothly. You have to add dynamic topology. So what it does when you pull out the structure, they're more points and edges will be added so that the surface will get smooth. Let me show you what I mean. Click here on the dynamic topology and click Okay. Now let's go back to Viewport Shading. And if you click here, you can see that it is more smooth. I mean by that if you go to wireframe mode, you can see that what is happening. Wherever you are, sculpting, more vertex points are getting added. So it is looking smooth. Alright? Okay, let's go back to Control Z. So let's start adding those small appendages. These things. You have to increase the strength of the brush. You have several setup brush, you can experiment with them. Click on that one brush and have a look what all those brushes are doing. Or these brushes have different, different applications. So we will go with the snake hook brush for now. So we have to increase the strength to six. Now, if you pull out the structure, you can see that it is getting pulled out more efficiently because the brushes more strong note C. Alright, so let's add all those appendages. If you zoom in by scroll, you can see that the area of conduct of that brush on that meshes small. So the size of the mesh getting pulled out will be small. If I go out and the area of conduct of that brush on the surface of the mesh is higher. So you can see that it is pulling out a lot of mesh. So we don't want that. So let's keep this optimum height. And let's add these structures here and there. So our idea is not to replicate just exactly how it should be in reality. This is a representational image. Alright, so we are using for the purpose of communications. So we want to highlight the main features of the seven. I think that is fine. So now we can add one bacteria. Here you can see a cancer cell where the pseudopods are modeled around that cell. Here we will add a bacteria. So let's go back to Layout. So let's move our cell to outside shift. Let's add a UV sphere. So if you press seven will go to top view or you can go to view, Viewport top, go to edit mode by pressing tab and press. For getting wireframe view. Choose this wireframe or you can choose it to here. Alright? So if you click here, you can select these vertices. So now what do you have to do is click and drag and select the pieces just to the right side of the y-axis. Alright? And move them towards the x direction. So click on this Move tool and click on this red axis and just pull this out. Alright. That's all. If you press tab, you will go back to object mode. And now you have a bacteria like structure, which is a cylindrical shape. If you right-click on this, shade smooth, you have a bacteria. So let's scale it down. And it's more towards the macrophage. Basically, pseudopods will be coming out and we'll be wrapping around this bacteria. So let's put some angle by rotating the bacteria. So let's go back to sculpting mode and it's called doubt those pseudopods. So what do you have to keep in mind is you have to select the mesh that you are going to scalp and go to sculpting. And you have to make sure this dynamic topology is checked. Okay? And if you click here, you can see that these arms are coming up. Alright? So our idea is to pull out this arms like this. So it is wrapping around the bacteria. So the main idea of this project is to give you an idea of the possibilities of sculpting. So it might take a time to get comfortable with these brushes. Sculpting features of Blender where updated recently in last couple of months. So it is a great time to start learning Blender. Okay. Yeah, I think this is fine. So you can pull up from here. All right. Yeah. I think I think this is fine. So what do we have to do is go back to Layout. Now we have a structure. Click on the macrophage, right-click, Shade Smooth. Do the same for our bacteria. So right-click shields. All right. If you want to look through the camera plus 0 and zoom in a little bit. Log the camera in the default view by going to View, camera to view. Now, even if you scroll in and out and the camera view will be remaining constant, like remained be, it will remain static so you can move around the scene as you wish. So right now you want to add materials to these objects. You can go to rendered view. Click on the macrophage, add a material. So basically this is a cell. You can add a little bit of red color here like this. And add subsurface. Subsurface is characteristic where life gets a little bit inside to the body and gets scattered. So for example, if your skin is China with light, you can see that light entering a little bit inside. So for example, if you pass light through your hand, you can see light from the other side, right? So basically light is getting inside and getting scattered within that object. So when we add subsurface here to, for example, 0.6, you can see that it is becoming like skin sort of organic structure. So we're getting a cellular a look here. You can add a bit of material for the bacteria as well. Click here nu. Let's choose a green color for example. Yeah, I think that's all. You have. A nice illustration. Yeah. Let's add a nice background. Bring this tab upside, and click on this drop-down menu. Choose on shader editor, go to Object and zoom in a little bit. Shift a texture. For a night shift, a color mix, RGB. Connect this distance to FAQ, connect this color to color. And click on this color one. Choose blue. Click on this color to choose somewhere here in the red side. Now you have a background, right? I'm pressing 0 to go out of the camera view. They want to reduce the size of the bacteria. Now you can see that the origin of the bacteria is on the other side. So because we started from a sphere, you can bring it to the center of the bacteria by right-clicking. Set origin, origin to center of mass. And S for scale and scale it down. Okay, Let's go back to camera view. And to sell more different angle than the previous one. Yeah. I think this angle is clearly the story. All right. So let's add a light in the scene. We have already a lamp here. And I'm changing that value to treat those send and change from point to area. And increase the size a little bit to five. Same here, phi. And move it here. Like this. Just on top of that. You can reduce the power of the late. Maybe. Yeah, I think that is fine. That's all for now. I think we have a ready and illustration. If you don't want any subsurface scattering, you can change this subsurface back to 0 like that. So now you have it and choosing it blue color, maybe a red color for the bacteria. Now, you can choose colors as you wish. Like that's all you can blend up. And you have any image. Go to image, save as desktop. Macro phage. Know you have an image in the desktop. Okay, that's all. 7. Brain: Hi, in this project, you will make it 3D illustration of a human brain. You will use an actual 3D structure of a human brain. They rented by 3D scans of an individual's head. So first of all, we need at 3D structure of a brain. So you can go to a website called Blender. So this is maintained by a singular from National Institute of Mental Health. You can see a download section here in this drop-down menu, you can see brain for Blender. Click on that. Now, if you go down, you can see different kinds of visualization of a brain. We have a full hemisphere here, we have cortical mesh split here. And there are different kinds, but we will focus on full hemisphere. If you look here, you can see different kinds of file formats. We will go with the first one. You can see OBJ format. If you click on that, you can see a file is downloaded. Let's go to Downloads. So this is a compressed file. You have to extract this. To do that you can install wind or most of the system has inbuilt feature to extract files. So if you right-click here, I can see that extract here because I have been installed. If you click here, you can see the files. I have two files. One is for left hemisphere and the other one is for right hemisphere. So let's open Blender. Ok, now we can import our brain structure inside Blender. I'm going to delete the default cube by left clicking on the cube and press Delete, go to file. And you can see in both, and you can see various options. So depending upon the steady that you are industrial in, if it is detailed study of the three-dimensional morphology of the structure, whether it is brain or other parts of the body. It is most likely that there will be a 3D file which is attached along with the manuscript in the journals. So you can download that or you can directly contact the researchers asking for the file that you can import into Blender. You can see various options. It can be extremely, it can be dot SDL for now it is dot OBJ. You can see new friend, you can click that. And you can go to downloads, open the folder, and you can see both files. A legend knowledge, let's import left hemisphere. Double-click. Now, Blender is in boating the structure. Now the model is here. But we can see anything properly because the model size is very big. If you zoom out by scrolling the mouse wheel, you can go out, can go out and see the index structure. It is really big compared to the normal scale that we use for objects inside Blender. Let's invert the other hemisphere. Go to embed OBJ and RH for right hemisphere. Double-click on that. And now the file is in voting. Okay, now we have both hemisphere. It looks very fantastic because it is a real 3D model of a brain. You can see the exterior of the brain in very detail. But the interior of the brain is not as much detail. We will focus on the exterior. So we need to scale it down. So what I'll do first, I'll bring the camera out. Right now, our camera is inside of the model. You can go to outliner windows here, click on camera, and come here and choose this Move Tool. Now you can see the position of the camera. Let's bring it out by clicking on this green axis, move it out. There is a lighter also trapped inside the model. So I'll move that also out. Click on this light and move out like this. What I'll do is click and drag, select both hemisphere and plus S. And scale it down a lot like this, right? Otherwise you can scale it down by using shortcuts. I'll go back. Let me show you that. Press S and followed by 0.05. Alright, so if you want to scale into half, you can press S 0.5. If you want to double the size, you can press S two like that. All right, so let's zoom in. So you can see the brain is oriented downwards. Let's rotate it. Click and drag, select. And press R for rotation and x for x, x, x. And move the mouse. You can rotate like this. If you want to rotate along y-axis, you can plus RY and move them all so it will notate. Otherwise you can use this tool which is shown here. It is called rotate. So I'll move it up above the origin. You can see the origin now. Yeah, so now we are. Good to go. I'll move a little more up. Okay? So I'll add a plane, press Shift a. You can see mesh and click on plane. So I'll scale it up. And more than most like this, maybe a little bit more. Plus S again, and move like this. Okay. So zooming, choose an angle which you would like to take the image. Yeah, I think this angle looks good. So right now, I want to orient my camera in that direction. For that you can use the shortcut Control Alt 0. Now you can see an outline came around the brain in that orientation. That is what camera sees. That is what will get as the final output, right? So I'll zoom in a little bit, scroll wheel, and I'll choose this orientation so I can see the brain properly. Go to views here and check this camera to view so that the camera will be locked in that direction. Now, if you go to rendered view, you can't see anything because there are no lights in the scene. There is one light, but we need to increase the brightness of that light. So whenever you want to find an object in the scene, you can go here and locate that object so I can see the light here. So basically this here, I'll move it towards the brain. Now you can see the latest coming and casting on the brain. And you can see the shape right? Now, if I go back to camera view, I can see the shape. One more problem we need to solve is you can see that the brain's surface looks like sort of, sort of arrangement of so many polygons. So we need to make it look smooth. So select one mesh, left-click, and right-click. Shade Smooth. Now you can see the surface has become smooth. Do that for the other hemisphere also, right-click to smoke. Okay, Now if you look through the camera, you can see an image of brain. So right now I want more background paste so I can zoom out. What you can observe is the camera is locked in that orientation. It is not moving because we have chosen the camera to View Log option. That's fine. Alright. So if I zoom out further, yeah, I'll choose this angle. So let's add more lights in the scene. So what I'll do, I'll move this light towards the camera and let it be here. I would like to always work with area lamps. We can change this point line area for that. What we can do here in the light properties and choose area here. So now it has become a lamp. You can see clearly if you increase the size here by clicking on this number box and move the mouse right and left, you can adjust the size. So I'll increase the dimension in X and also in white. So it has become a bigger lamp. So now it is oriented in this direction. So we want to rotate into that other direction. So for that, you can see that this is y-axis. So I'll plus RY to rotate the light. Now it is facing towards our brain. Let's go back to camera view. Now you can see that the brain is well lit. So if I increase the brightness of this lamp, you can add more late. I'll choose 1200. Okay. Let's give a material. If you click here and drag up, you can see another working area. You can see a drop-down menu here. Click on that and go to shader editor. Now click on this brain. We have a material by default. It is white in color. You can see two nodes here. This is the final output. This is the node which involves all the settings of this material. For example, if I click on this base color and choose a different color, I can see that the color is Teams. So what I'll do, I'll choose a material which is similar to our actual material, which is kind of scattered light. Let me show you that it is very simple. You can see an option called subsurface. If you increase that. What you are seeing right now here, this half looks realistic organic structure, which is similar to our skin. For example. You can see here subsurface color. If you change that color towards the red, you can see that clearly here. And move this door towards somewhere here, for example. And click on other half of the brain and choose that material for that half also, by going here in the material properties, click here. And you can click on this drop-down arrow. You can see all the materials within this project. Currently. You can see the review of that material. You can see it looks like the organic material. Click on that. Now it is very clear. Alright. So now our illustration is ready. You can take the output, but we will do more. Beautification. We can add a background. What I'll do, I'll click on this plane, left-click. If you go out, you can see that the plane is selected. So I'll add a material to that. Also. Click on this New. Now we have a new material for the plane. So let's add a texture for that plane. You can add new texture node by pressing Shift a, you can see texture. So what I'll do, I'll choose Voronoi that are various textures. You can have a look. I'll add that we have a texture information, we need color information. So for that, but it's shifted. Again. You can see color and go to mix RGB and connect this distance output to FAQ input of this mixed color node and connect this color to base color and click on this color one, and choose one color, and click on this color and choose a different color. Now, if you change this k here in this texture node, I'll choose a 100. Right? Now you can see there is a texture in the background, right? So I haven't changed that other color. You can become creative with these colors. So what we have done basically, we have at texture information, we have connected that color information. And that texture will decide how to distribute this color. And that information we have connected to the color, that of the plane. Right? Now, it's ready to go, but you can become even more creative by adding more textures. Press Shift a again. Go to texture, choose add different texture. For example, Musgrave texture, connect this height output, vector input. Now you can see that the background has become different, Right? Basically we have given this texture data to this extra data, and both of them are combined to create a new texture. And you can adjust the properties here as well. So what I'll do, I'll, I'll go with five. Now you can see clearly the background because the intensity of the light is very low. What I'll do, I'll increase the intensity of the light to 2500. I'll increase the size of the light by pressing S. Now, we have more diffused light in the scene. So increase the brightness to 10 thousand. Now if you look through the camera and the scene is very clear and everything is visible. So right now we can add a little bit of blur to the background so that the camera will focus only on the brain. So for that, what we'll do, we'll click on the camera here or click on this outline so that the camera is selected. Go to camera properties here in this green icon. You can see depth of field here. First, check this box and activate depth of field and click on this drop-down arrow. And you can see focus on object. So we have to define which object the camera should focus on. We will choose brain. Click on this eyedropper tool, and click on this half of the brain. Now, if you decrease the f-stop value, for example, 0.05, you can see that the background has got blood a lot so that only this area is in-focus. I'll increase the value 2.6. Okay, you can see a little bit of blur here. For now that is enough. So what I'll do, I'll move the camera a little bit towards the brain. Now we are good to go. And according to your taste, you can even change the intensity of the light. Again, I'll choose 13 thousand so that the scene is more bright. And if you want to even more creative, you can change the color of the Lamb by going to click on this lamppost, go to Properties and change the color here, click on this color and change the color. And if you look to the camera, now, you can see that at different a different field altogether. Now it is very blue and cold. If you move towards red, it is a very, a red and a very warm feel is the n. If you add more lights in the scene, you can be more creative with the lighting. So what I'll do, I'll press shift D, right? And if you move the mouse, you can move the duplicated light here. We have two lights in the scene. So I'll rotate this lamp towards the brain, are right. Now, this lambda is facing towards the brain. So change the color of the second lamp, go to Color and choose blue, something towards blue. Alright? And now if you look through the camera, you can see a line is passing through because the ALM is cutting through here. So what I'll do, I'll move it to somewhere in other direction. Now you can see some blue lighting here. So right now let's take an output, go to Render and press Render Image. That's all. If you want to change the resolution and dimension, you can go to Output Properties and change the resolution presented here, right, 1900%. You can change the dimension also. And if I press to render image, you can see a 3D illustration of a brain. Right now. I can save this by going to image. Save as desktop. Save As image. Now, if you go to desktop, now you can see a beautiful illustration of a brain. And now this is all yours. 8. DNA: Hi, welcome back to a new tutorial. We will be making a 3D structure of DNA. Alright. So here we have an image. This is the actual presentation of a DNA. You have minor grooves and major grooves. So we will be taking care of that as well. Alright, so let's go to Blender. So I'm adding a cube. So let me reduce the size of the cube x 2.32, the Y b1. So let me move the box to the side. Here you can see the location is getting changed. You can choose 1.04. Okay, that's enough. And this will represent the steps of the DNA, which is basically purines and pyrimidines. It will represent guanine, thymine, adenine, cytosine, those. So we can add phosphate group. Sphere is fine shipped a mesh UV sphere. We have to scale it down to scale object very smoothly. You can press S on the keyboard and how much you want to scale, whether it should be doubled. You can press S to, if you want to reduce the size to hop, you can press S 0.5. So I want to reduce the size to half. So I will press 0.5. Okay, So let me repeat that again as 0.5. So it became half. So I am moving that phosphate group to the other side of the box. So we will add a material to phosphate group by going to material properties. Click on New, click on the base color. Right now let's give it the red color. If you go to Viewport Shading, you can see the material. And I will right-click on the sphere and click Shade Smooth. Why? Let me go back. You can see this grid lines is visible here. I don't want to see that so you can right-click Shade Smooth. Now it is motor. So add a material for this box as well. Go to material properties. Click new, choose a different color. All right, so next step is we want to join this measures together. Click on this green box, but as shift and click on this sphere. So both of them are selected. Press Control J or Control J is for joining meshes, so it will act as one object. So right now you can see it has a common origin. If you move that it is moving together. Alright? The next step I will be doing is to move the origin of this object to send up here to center of the axis. Why I want to do that is because I will be adding a mirror modifier so that this object will be getting married to the opposite side. It will be getting red with respect to the origin of that object. So I'll right-click on this set, origin, origin to 3D cursor. So the origin is right now here. Here you can see that the box has sharp edges. I like smooth edges. So you can add, add a bevel modifier. So it basically smoothens out the corners. If you increase the amount of segments to five, can see that more segments that are getting added. And I will change the amount to 0.06. And if we go back to the this view, you can see that it's just getting smooth and I'll increase the segments with ten so that you can see that what is happening. Alright, so I like this. Let's add a mirror modifier. Go to Add Modifier, choose mirror, and choose the axis white. Now it is getting mirrored along the y axis. So next step is add a modifier. This RA modifier will repeat this object in a particular direction. So we want the direction to be z axis. So you can go to RA and change the x0 to x1 and x to 0. All right? So if you change the count here, you can see that it is getting repeated along the z axis. All right, so let's choose 25. Okay? So we want to rotate this array so that it didn't form a helical structure. So for that, we want to add an empty axis, which will help us rotate this array in a helical fashion. For that we have to press the Shift a, go to empty, choose plate axis. So what just happened here is more axis is visible, right? You can see that. So using that, we will be controlling the arrangement of these base units or light. So this is the most interesting part. I love this because you have a much more control on your object. So what we have to do is click on your array and check this object opposite minimum. Tick that, and there is a drop-down arrow. Click on that. And so click on this Eyedropper tool and choose on this empty when you are exactly on top of Mt, you can see that there is a empty which is written there. Alright? Alright. So you can see that something weird, things are going on because we have made so many changes to the mesh in the beginning. So we want to apply all those changes to that mesh. That is an important step. So for that we have to add control a. You will get then a play menu and choose all transform. So basically we have a plate all the transformation that scaling, The, Changing the origin, etc, are applied to the mesh. So right now, everything is good to go. So click on this empty. If you rotate this empty, if you go here and rotate this z axis, click on this z axis and move like this. You can see that it is getting rotated. Let me go back. Or otherwise you can press R to rotate objects. If you want to rotate along a particular axis, you have to press that axis as well. So here we will be pressing R, right? So you can see BlueLine has come. And if I move the mouse, you can see that it is getting rotated. That's all in DNA. We have 10.5 base pairs in a one-term 360 by 10.5, you will get 34.28 degree, which is the angle of rotation between the base pairs. So you go to this rotation tab and change this z value from 0 to 34. That's all right. Now you can see that there is huge gap between individual base pairs. So I'll change that if you go to Modify tab and change the z value from one to choose 0.75. Okay, so let's add a camera in the scene. So if you rotate like this, and if you want to position your camera in that direction, what you can do is press Control, Alt, Control plus Alt plus 0. Now my camera has come in that direction. So I'll zoom in a little bit. I will freeze that camera in that location by going to View, on camera to view and zoom out. Alright, that's it. Now I have a 3D model of a beam. So if you go to rendered view, you can see that there is no light in the scene. I will add a lamp. Light, a lamp. You can always remember that shift a is the key for adding any new object. So I have a lamb here. If I move it up and go to land properties and change the power to tau center. We have a light, I'll move in this direction. Or camera is here. So I'll keep this lamp here and rotate along y-axis by pressing R Y. Okay? Let me show you that again. For theta along y-axis are white or light. So if you look through the camera, you can see that there is light. So I'll add one more light in the scene. And I'll increase the size of the light by pressing S and scale the light chains, the power of that light to six. Alright, we have one light coming from this side, one light coming from this side. I will add one more light in the direction of the camera. I'll rotate along the y-axis by pressing Z. Like this. You can adjust the lighting as you like. So I'll change it to 20 thousand or so right now it is ready to go. I'll remove the background by going to render properties and click on this drop-down menu and click on transparent. Now we don't have any background. One of thing that you will notice more frequently in 3D images. They use dark outlines around the object. You can see that there is a black outline around the object. Here. You can see that there is a black outline around this object. And an organic shape is the robotic arm. So I like that putting a dark bold outline around an object. So to add that, what do you have to do is go to Render properties and check this freestyle. Alright, if you click on this drop-down, you can change the thickness of the line as line thickness. Right now it is one. I'll choose it to be 1.5. Okay? One thing in Blender is all the settings of this freestyle is not here. You have to go to View layer properties and go down there. You can see three-step and go a little bit down. There are several options. I won't explain all the details, but right now what you want is condo, uncheck this border and silhouette and check this condo. So right now we will get there dark border around the DNA S, okay, we are ready to take the image. One thing that we have to keep in mind is we still don't have minor grooves and major grooves for the DNA. So if you move the empty to the right side along y-axis by changing the y value 2.5. Now what happened is we have a character representation of the DOM. Render the final image out by going to render and click on Render Image. You can click F2. So right now you can see that the rendering is happening. You can see the progress here. It is still at 98. So right now what is happening? Blender is calculating the outline so it takes more time than the usual renderer, which we don't use any outlines. Let's wait for a couple of seconds. For light. We have our final image. You can see that we have an outline around the object blackout plane. Let me save this image. Go to Image. Save, As I'll save the desktop. Right now, I have an image in the desktop which is usable. So this is not an actual ball-and-stick molecular structure of the DNA. This is a representational DNA. So as a bonus section, I will show you how can you create a molecule or presentation of the DNA in blender? I'll delete this DNA. So for this, we have to use another software called Avogadro. I'll put the link to the software in the description. You can find them. So once you open the software, you can build a menu, go to Build, and go to Insert and choose DNA slash RNA. Now, gastro is asking what are the base? Since you want to add, I will add a C T G, C T, T G, C, D. Alright, I won't change any other settings. So if you want single-strand DNA, you can choose single. I will go with the double press Insert. And now you have DNS structure. Alright? You can save this structure by going to File Save As and save as DDB. You can see PDB, which is nothing but Protein Data Bank file. Say. One interesting thing is you can import PDB structures in Blender. Alright? So blender has an add-on which enables us to emote PDB structure directly into Blender. So this was an add-on which was created a while ago and blender added to the default software package. So you have to enable that by going here to edit the type drop-down menu. And in the corner here, you can choose these preferences. And there you can type PDB in here in the search bar, B-D be there, you will see an add-on called import export, atomic blender. Check that, and go back to 3D viewport by clicking here and 3D viewport. Now you can import our DNA structure. How cool is that? So go to File, Import. You have a new option called Protein Data Bank. Click here. In our desktop, we have a DNA file called DnaA dot PDB. So let's wait. Or how cool is this? You have a DNS structure here. If you go to rendered view, you can see that you have a beautiful structure of DNA. This is only a part of a DMA if you build a little bit bigger DNA. So you can plug whatever you have built so far by going here and pressing close. And let's build a DNA again. By going to insert DNA, you have to insert more seconds here so that you will have a big DNA. And just insert. Zoom out by scrolling down. See you have bigger DNA. You can import that as well. This is how it is done. So I don't want any outlines here. It will take much more time to calculate outline for all of these spheres. So for now, I will uncheck this freestyle and render an image. So what can be the blender is like quite satisfying, like every image is a new problem. Like you will find the methods if you know how it can be done somehow, you can find everything online by typing right keywords. You how to mention what are the features. For example, a particular modifier that can be used you how to type that name. We have a final image. All right, so you can say this as save, as desktop. Like this, you can build out of Nashville that in our garden that we have seen already. Hearing build menu, insert, there is an option as well. You can change this DNA to RNA. How can you just put this in bold? So right now you have an atomic structure of DNA that you can use. It is all yours. Alright? So if you want to change the lighting, like if you want to increase the brightness, you can, most of the times you can change here itself in the windows. Go here and choose adjustment and change the light. Now it is more than vector. And you can increase the contrast here. And see if you are using Mac, there will be similar option or you can use Photoshop or you can modify your image in PowerPoint as well. Almost all Word document files has image editing options so you can increase brightness. It's like that. Okay, That's all. This is how you make them.