MEGAHERZ Luspatercept – medical visualization

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MEGAHERZ Luspatercept – medical visualization

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Big world, small scale

The challenge with medical visualizations is that most of the time you are asked to explain complex situations you know nothing about. Fortunately for this project – an explanatory view of the mode of action of a new drug – we were briefed with a visual and easily understandable storyboard to guide us through the animation and the production process of the needed assets. An absolute necessity regarding the complex topic, but a worthwhile collaboration between science and design nonetheless.

Morphing from phase to phase

To show the ripening of the red blood cells, the client wished for a one-shot, so exchanging assets during cuts was not an option. I had to find a way to actually run the same model through different stages while staying focused on it with the camera all the time.

In the end I sculpted each phase in Mudbox, while making sure to always use the same primitive sphere as a base. Because I planned on making use of Cinema 4D‘s morphing system to be able to continuously pass through each stage, this was necessary to rule out weird polygon movements and artifacts.

A couple of manual key frame animations in combination with animated procedural noise took care of the final organic look.

Protein databases

Since the animation was mainly aiming for health professionals, it would not do that we were taking liberties with the look of all the specific elements. Even all the colorful, bubbly protein structures had to look the way they apparently really do.

Fortunately, the client could help here by drawing our attention to specialized opensource databases where exact 3d-models of these structures were already available: a great time-saver!

Filling empty space

There are several visual tools that can contribute to the feeling of seeing into a micro-cosmos. To achieve the final look, we used a camera with a high depth of field in addition to volumetric fog and some god-rays to be composed in Adobe Aftereffects later, since we were using the software for the tracked typo-animation anyway.

Nevertheless, we needed a lot of assets in different sizes to fill up all this empty space and further sell the idea. With instanced models from kit-bash libraries and previous projects – mainly animated again with help of procedural noise – we were able to deliver the animation in finite time.