We’ve been working on a lot of new stuff – totally unable to find time to upload. Here’s a sample of some of the science-focused work we’ll be doing in the next year:
Electron Micrograph look and feel. This is spectacularly difficult to tune. 
DNA Strand.
Mother Earth. May she continue to bear our weight.
Awesome! I love science and I love art. WTG Spence.
Wow, beautiful! I think I know kinda maybe how you did the blue swirls on the DNA… lemme try that….
Thanks Matt! Totally fun too.
Oliver: Before you get to into it, those are “Helix” splines available from the create panel and then set to render. The material uses “Falloff” in the transparency slot. Play with that.
Yeah figured it was falloff. What menu are those from? The shapes section?
O: Shapes section in the create panel.
I know exactly what you mean about “This is spectacularly difficult to tune.”… I have tried doing this with lenses and effects passes, not to mention depth blurring and fall-offs. I think you nailed it here! time to write down those settings and carve them into the desk next to your mouse!
Hah! Yep. It’s carved.
I surfed up a bunch of electron microscope images and kept going back to the render over and over. The light does really odd stuff at this scale. The edges of things glow with rimlight from a non-existent light source.
I got this effect by putting a Fresnel Falloff in the Diffuse slot with White on the edges and whatever color you want on the inside. I used the same Falloff map for self-illumination. I used a Fractal Noise generator in the Displacement slot and then Turbo-Smoothed the crap out of the geometry. A Single white Omni Light with Area Shadows and a SkyLight with the shadows set to ON and 10 Rays per Sample lights the scene. Rendered out at 1080p with a Z-Channel pass and composited in Photoshop. I’ve got a freshy 4 second render of this stuff with an animated camera waiting for me to do the comp in After Effects.
Zoom!
I need to get this familiar with Maya now.
Spence, why is it that almost all of the CG people that render planets and space views of big round things in space put the goofy little reflection behind the planet as if looking through a lens? I like the image, but why the lens reflection? That is what I’m seing, isn’t it?
Hey!
The real answer is that space, it’s pretty empty of, well,… everything. It’s boring so we VFX artists are constantly trying to find way to put stuff in front of the camera. If you look at some of the Astronomy Picture of the Day pics of near-earth orbits, unless you’re looking at a space station or something cool on the planet, everything else is either totally black or a lens flare. Those flares actually happen quite a bit up there because the optics get fogged by the extreme temp changes.
Make sense?
Spence – not only is y our work awesome, but its freakin inspirational. Great job