In this Blender 2.5 video tutorial we take a look at how to create a microscopic virus effect in a few short steps.
The tutorials covers modeling, materials, lighting, and some simple compositing.
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Discussion
80 Responses to “Creating a Microscopic Virus Effect”Leave a Comment
very cool, thanks again jonathan for furthering my blender education
Thanks Jonathan! i made this picture based on your tutorial!
http://www.blender3d.org.ua/gallery/iwe/upload/microscopic7.jpg
Thats amazing!!!
WOW!
And this cool glowing!!!
Nice work!
Nice one dude , very nicely exploited the knowledge given here. May I ask how you did these long stringsy creatures?
I am a molecular biology student and previous art major and I am very impressed. Great work!
That is so awesome. The tutorials you put out are nothing short of impressive. I love it
Very nice tutorial
Just one thing: Why didn’t you use an Empty to determin the focus distance? I find it way more convenient to place an empty in space, just where I need it than to fiddle around with the limit slider…
Because I find the slider to be faster to set up if you know where you want to focus
You are absolutely right though that the Empty gives more control.
-Jonathan
Or you can just put the name of the virus you want to focus on in the object field.
i cant get past the part when you undo it
Nice tutorial! If you don’t like the bad topology of the icosphere you can enable regular solids addon (add mesh category) and experiment with that. You might get away without bevel tool that way.
I actually did experiment with that for a while and never came up with anything better than the icosphere. There were a few comparable that’s it.
-Jonathan
I am blown away, fantastic work, cant wait to give it a go
This looks like Andrew Kramers (videocopilot.net) 3D Spikes he created in 3DS Max
http://www.videocopilot.net/blog/2010/07/3d-experimental/
Very cool thank you guys.
THANKS , just finished the virus , i made it purple . nice tuto .
Hey, very nice as always
Though no sign of apple part two? :’(
Thanks Jonathan, great tutorial!
I think in this case (even though the effect is used too often these days) the image even improves when you add another node with slight lens distortion and chromatic abberation. This way you make it look even more like it would be seen through a microscope.
Thanks again!
MD
This tutorial will go well with Andrew Kramer’s “Medical Zoom” tutorial for After Effects. Awesome job Jonathan!
Hi, please, i have a question. I’m working with blender 2.49 and i can’t do the RGB to intensity with the clouds. How do you do that with blender 2.49?
I think you should go to http://www.blender.org and downlod 2.53 It is way easy to work with and is the future of blender!
Haha, now that you guys are in the compositor you are actively competing with Andrew Price. Good tutorial!
This tutorial was great! I’ve been following the tutorials from this site since the day I started using Blender several months ago (or any other 3d program for that matter) and I’m very grateful for all the helpful tips that I’ve gotten through these videos. Is it okay if I’d post a link with a render of what I came up with with the things you’ve taught in this tutorial? I’d really like some feedback on one of my “creations”.
Hi Steff, I would love to see a link to what you have done!
-Jonathan
Thanks. Well, here’s a link: http://www.deviantart.com/download/176898707/Green_viruses_by_McSwiff.png
I made a different “main virus” model and duplicated that one so that I could make minor variations in the material and I made two particle systems for the rest of the scene.
Once again, thanks for your tutorials.
Awesome effect and very well presented.
Excellent tutorial as always Jonathan!
You rock
-tungster
Excellent tutorial
THX Jonathan
This is exactly the kind of effect I’ve been looking for. Love the materials and rendering. Great job, man!
Yay! Your dog is awesome It’s supporting the bevel modifier! =D
But…
Let’s create soe EXTRA INTEREST in this!
Like so.
And depth of field is the 3D lens flare.
Sorry, I couldn’t resist!
Don’t hate me for that.
Very nice tutorial , I know you can show us, how to model and render a nice candle one day
thank you .
Hi from italy…great tutorial…but now i’d like to animate it! when the next tutorial??
Stefano
thank’s Jonathan ! I love this tuto… very cool for the defocus fx.
Is there a way to visualise the limits – behind and after – the focus of the camera aera to control better the deph of field in the ortho top of view ? Thank’s again
Had my own go, this is my favorite tutorial so far:
http://i163.photobucket.com/albums/t301/pharion/GermFactoryLargmailto:support@cgcookie.zendesk.comeclip.jpg
Link went wrong:
http://i163.photobucket.com/albums/t301/pharion/GermFactoryLargeclip.jpg
Very cool and simple tutorial! Thank you, Jonathan!
Awesome tutorial Jonathan
Here are 2 versions w/ a lil’ twist, http://madmax2k10.deviantart.com/gallery/#
I keep tweaking it, and some reason I’m getting alot of Blender crashes with this one, So I’m marking it done -n- giving the Teacher A+++++’s
Thanks again Jonathan and All of you @ BlenderCookie for the tutorials.
Madmax2K10
This would also work great for blood cells, or anything microscopic for that matter.
we’re currently studying the human immune system in biology so i decided to use this tutorial to model several other types of virus such as T4 and the influenza virus, it’s looking really cool and i plan to present it to my teacher when im done. thanks for all the great tut’s jonathan!
Wow, that’s one lovely tutorial Jonathan. At first I thought you were going to use meta objects for this but your approach seems simply ingenious. Finally, thanks for introducing the Select Similar feature, huge time saver!! Thanks
Great tutorial, thanks a lot. Can’t wait to try it out.
Greetings from Germany.
Very nice! Awesome effect.
ALT-S doesn’t seem to work for me.
Nevermind, I was doing it wrong.
How did you fix it? Cause I’m having the same problem.
Finally finished my version of this, and I’m extremely satisfied. I set it as my desktop background.
http://img84.imageshack.us/img84/8559/microscopic2.png
Thank you for this tutorial.
Sir, that’s just awesome, thank you for sharing.
Here’s mine, I liked how it turned out but considering that I have a bad cold right now I prefer to think of this as pollen instead of a virus. ;^)
I do have a question though. I couldn’t get anything to move when I was moving the vertices of the cube, but I just kind of dealt with that. What I’m more concerned about is where those glowing orbs behind the individual particles came from. Does anyone have any idea? I would have guessed the hemi lamp but there are three of them that are visible.
Arg, forgot to paste the link!
http://s72.photobucket.com/albums/i191/shegeek1000101/?action=view¤t=microscopicbg.jpg
Hi Mena,
It looks like you forgot to check “None” under the render options for the particles. By default particles render as halos, which is what you are seeing behind your “pollen.”
-Jonathan
That was the problem, thanks for the quick answer and the really cool tutorial!
http://s72.photobucket.com/albums/i191/shegeek1000101/?action=view¤t=pollen.jpg
Thanks fot the tut. I’ve spent two weekends trying to get the first 3 minutes exactly as you have. I have got some nice results despite not being able to extrude as you have. The problem is the faces tend to diverge no matter how careful I am. I just wish you had spent a little more time over this as it is critical to the final result.
For example you never mention ‘shift E’, with is short, I think for extruding individual faces, so in fact it extrudes in the normal direction. You seem to E and then alt S…which I can’t see working. So first you seem to E and then S to size (inwards=smaller) just a tiny bit, and then you extrude with E. You NEVER mention shift E but how to you stop the faces collapsing in on each other, or diverging away from each other?
Thanks for all the tips and tuts,
Gerard
Great tutorial, thanks!
But, is it possible to put a depth of field in an animation, if yes how?
-Greg
Thanks very much for this Tutorial.
I’ve search a Technik like this for long Time
cheers,mate! made a kick-ass acid green virus! keep it up
added more to my virus scene with some other micro things looks great thanks again!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/56587701@N04/5226297891/lightbox/
Somehow alt-s doesnt work for me. When i do it everything collapses.
Try pressing CTRL + N to flip the normals of your selection and then press ALT + S.
-Jonathan
Thanks Jonathan! This tutorial got me back into blender after a 2-year hiatus. Here are some germs I put together yesterday.
http://www.rendeavor.com/wp-content/gallery/rendeavor-collection/prettypathogens1-1920×1080-signed.png
- Steve
Thank You Jonathan! Awesome
Hi, I’m an Italian Blender user searching for cool tutorials like this.
Unfortunately, I can’t understand the part from 3.04 to 4.20, because the speech is just too fast for me.
Does anybody can write it for me?
Thanks you so much!
@Luca R.-
3:05- And so now what we want to do is we’re just gonna hit “E” to extrude, and let’s right-click, and then hit “S” and scale in just a little bit, and then we’re gonna hit “E” to extrude again, and this time we’re gonna scale it out, way out, and actually let’s hit “Alt-S” to scale along the normals, that way they kind of shrink as they go out as well. We’ll take it out to about right there (3:27) and then we’re gonna hit “E” to extrude again, and once more do “Alt-S” and then hit left click once more, which will just shrink all those faces down. Then, on these faces, we can go ahead and hit “W” and “Smooth” if we want. (3:46) Maybe adjust these a little bit. There we go, and so now we have a kind of cool effect going on, but I’m actually going to step back and undo that a little bit, because what I’d really like to have is for it to be more of kinda tentacles that start thickest at the bottom, then get thinner, and thinner, so we have a nice taper on it, so now I’m just going to select those again, extrude out, lemme smooth it a few times, fix any weird faces, one more time, just kinda tweaking it until we get what we like. And that looks pretty good, so now we have just a spiky ball. (4:20)
There ya go!
@Jacob\n\nThank you so much! Moooore better
Hi, thanks for tutorial, but I am getting a white blur spots/dots on my final image from Hemi lamp may be and can’t find the error. May be you can comment something about that.please
Many thanks,
DON
Hi all, I found someone selling a tutorial based on this one on a famous french website, everuthing seems to be copied and well the result is not as good.. your tutorials are copyrighted or not ?
here is the link :
http://fr.tuto.com/blender/creation-de-virus-blender,16477.html
Yeah that is essentially my tutorial, exact same techniques and everything. However since he has recreated everything from scratch and is not actually using my content I don’t believe he’s breaking any copyrights. In a way I am humbled…
Thanks for pointing it out!
-Jonathan
I really don’t like people making money with work of others.. at least if it was free or if they would add something to improve the result, but nothing.. it’s pathetic.
Keep doing great work, BlenderCookie is one of the best blender tuto website.
I’ll signal any other videos like this.
MAy I ask how you get your interface and panels layout to be like that? thnx for the great tutorials
The interface difference is because the tutorials, and all our other newer tutorials use the latest 2.5 beta from here: http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs/blender-256-beta/
-Jonathan
For some strange reason when I get to the alt+s part half of the faces scale outwards the object and half inwards. A newbie would be very grateful of some solutions to the problem
.
Nevermind…
should have read the rest of the comments before leaving one 
.
Thanks Jonathan for the awesome tut
haha so I did not make this, NPR posted it in a picture on an article they just put up,and let me tell you it looks a LOT like the image was made using your tutorial. Thoughts?
http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2011/10/04/141047481/surprise-in-your-sewage-lots-of-exotic-viruses?sc=fb&cc=fp
every time I render the image the cube keeps showing up. what can I do to prevent that?
I think that you have forgotten to uncheck the “emitter-box” (time 23.38) at Box > Particles > Render
WoW
cool!
good tuto here I leave my virus: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-TaXQqAD3iuw/TrgQqLaGTKI/AAAAAAAAAPc/rhtZ3efUeuM/s1600/virusMicroscopico.png
Wow really sweet tutorial! I made mine a little different, I think it turned out pretty cool! Thanks.
http://cgcnetwork.cgcookie.netdna-cdn.com/blender/files/2011/12/Virus-956×537.jpg
Nice result! You might lighten it up a little but good use of the tutorial
-Jonathan
Hmmm, you are right. Thanks, it looks much better now!
my virus looks like glass and the second texture messed up everything to thousands of tiny little white dots :/
Great video and all, but totally lost when you assigned the empty and manipulated it. It is like there needed to be more explanation there after a couple hours trying to recreate your clicks I have given up.
How do you switch into side view? (: