- Introduction
- Details
- Course Schedule
- Contact
Welcome to 20.S947! This course is designed to progress students from beginners to confident users of modern 3D rendering software with a focus on biological and chemical scenes in Blender. The course will provide an overview of 3D modeling, realistic materials, and scene composition. By the end of the course, students will feel comfortable rendering realistic scenes for scientific figures, journal covers, presentations, and community outreach.
While the course will be offered in person, all lectures will be provided asynchronously to fit a wide range of schedules. In addition, the class will follow a live demo format, where students can follow along and ask questions as they familiarize themselves with increasingly complex scenes. The course will use Blender, the leading open-source software for 3D rendering, used across science, animation, video game development, and virtual reality.
Prereq: None Units: 1-0-1 Room: 56-154 Schedule:
- JAN 18, 2023 - 10:30-11:30AM
- JAN 23, 2023 - 10:30-11:30AM
- JAN 25, 2023 - 10:30-11:30AM
For many of you, this will be your first introduction to the world of 3D modeling. At first it will feel foreign, and you will likely find yourself wondering, how can I possibly remember all this? Don’t worry! Everyone feels this way when they start. In fact, this first lesson is designed to make you feel that way. By the end of this lesson, you will have seen EVERYTHING you need to make a high-quality journal cover. The next three lessons will reinforce what we learn today and introduced more advanced topics.
- 20.S947: Intro to 3D Scientific Rendering
- Converting molecular structures to 3D meshes
- Basics of manipulating molecular structures in Blender
- Experimenting with Blender materials for molecules
- Experimenting with lighting for molecular scenes
- More realistic Eevee render settings
- Stylize your molecular scene with the compositor
Congratulations on finishing the first lesson! I hope it wasn’t too overwhelming. In this next lesson, we will be using our render from the previous lesson to design a journal cover. We will pull from what we learned in the previous lesson but will also introduce almost all the topics you will need to consider yourself a Blender expert. You should feel a little overwhelmed after this lecture but trust me that is the only way to learn 3D modeling!
- Viewing your molecular scene from the lens of a journal cover
- Using environmental textures to improve molecular scenes
- Adding procedural material to molecules
- Adding realistic PBR material to molecules
- Create a dust and smudged lens effect with Blender’s compositor
Hope you appreciate how far you have come. Using the skills, you have learned in Lectures 1 & 2, you will be able to render just about any still scene given a starting structure. However, there is one last topic I would like to introduce you to, and that is Animations. Being able to render scientific movies and animations can be a powerful tool for community outreach and getting your work scene. In this lesson, we will take the final scene from lesson 1 and turn it into a simple movie showcasing the binding of a peptide to the MHC pocket.
- Animating a ligand binding
- Creating a looping animation effect
- Creating predictable dust particles that appear random
- Rendering and processing an animation in Blender