Blender for Scientists - How to Make Mitochondria in Blender

welcome back to another cg figures tutorial in today's video i'll be going through how to make mitochondria in blender go ahead hit x and delete the default cube you can hit the tilde key and drag to top view or hit 7 on your number pad from there i'm going to hit shift a and add in a curve bezier if you don't have all these extra options don't worry we only need bezier once you've got that zoom in a little bit tab into edit mode and making sure everything is selected hit x and delete all the vertices we're actually going to get rid of all of the original parts of that curve to get the internal mesh that you have in many organelles including mitochondria we're actually going to freehand draw it so come over here grab this little draw pencil and starting somewhere along the x-axis just freehand up roughly the shape that you want so these kind of lobes coming in and out if they don't look perfect don't worry about that the curve will smooth it out once you've finished drawing it holding down and drawing if you have a mouse which is what i'm using this will be okay if you had something more like a stylus and a drawing pad you might have an easier time but once you're done just drag out until around here and try and end on the axes you can see that we're going to have to go do a little bit of cleanup here if we look in areas like this where there's some obvious bending and kinking we don't want that so just come back to the select box and then grab these individual toggles very important anytime you're going to move these make sure that you hit g to move and then shift z we don't want these to be moving up and down in the z direction just in the x and y direction so grabbing them individually moving them out and kind of aligning them to where we want to go this is actually already not bad like you can see that i'm going to try and come over here and deal with this one which is a little bit out of place so we'll bring that down in fact i think we can probably lose this point so x with that vertices selected to just delete it vertex not vertice once you have this curve roughly traced out we're going to make a few changes go ahead and grab these little end points right here hit n to activate the side panel and make sure that the y value here is zero similarly for this other side we want this y value to be exactly zero we don't need any of the rest of them to be and in fact it's a little better for the technique that we're doing if the rest of the loop is above the x-axis so just above here if these little points below are under that's okay they're only controlling curvature we can now actually start setting this up so tab out of edit mode come into a side view and then go to the modifier properties and we're going to add a screw modifier we'll change the axis from z to x and now you can see we almost have the shape that we want it's just a little bit off so change the angle to minus 180 degrees and now we have that internal mesh that we were looking for you can also control the resolution here so let's say i want 32 steps instead of 16 that's going to add a little bit make sure that you're going to update the render steps as well because this is just what you see in the viewport and this is what it will actually be when you finish your image one other thing that is worth mentioning is because we did this with a curve we can tab into edit mode and modify this at any time so we can grab that move it around you can see it's updating in real time we can also come down to the object data properties for the curve and we can increase the resolution across this whole thing by simply changing this resolution preview u number from 12 to a higher number and if you with your freehand drawing were very very crude and everything is a little bit angular bringing that number up may help smooth it out there are a few things that we have to change these little points at the end are standing out in a way that i'm not necessarily happy with so we're going to fix that tab into edit mode grab the controls for the curvature not the actual point this is the actual point these are for the curvature hit g shift z and then drag that until it comes into sort of a flat plane like this we'll do the same thing on the other side and again if you're not happy with where it's positioned then you can grab the center point and just move it along the x-axis so we now have something that's largely ready to go if you want to change the shape at any time you can simply do that by coming in and moving any of these individual points closer to or farther from the axes you can also because of the way the screw modifier works tab into edit mode a to select everything hit g and y and then move these further apart and you'll get this sort of wide look very important when you do this you don't want to have this point or this point selected so just shift and click on both of those then g and y and that will keep those two points in place something like this is fine so this is going to be the internal part of our mitochondria one thing that's worth noting is that if we wanted to do a quick transform and make this into something more like a golgi apparatus we could do that by enabling merge vertices and then bringing this merge distance up very very far and now you can see we actually have those sort of internal disks that you might use for golgi again if you really want to make this into a golgi now we have these sort of disks that have this obvious divot in the middle you would increase the resolution of this by simply tapping into mode hitting a right click choose subdivide and then you could repeat that a few times to get a lot of extra curvature and move that around i don't want to do that for this case i want everything to stay as simple and editable as possible but that is how that would work and again we're working on mitochondria right now so uncheck merge vertices or rather keep merge vertices enabled because it might help down here but we're going to bring that value way down so that we can actually maintain that inner channel one of the problems with this approach is that you tend to get a high degree of symmetry because we just used a screw this is going to be exactly symmetrical across the x axis if that's not something that you want to have to see or you want a little bit more variation as you would often see in these figures we're going to do that by using a simple deform modifier uh which works for mitochondria pretty nicely because they tend to be encapsulated in those little bean-like structures phospholipid bilayers whatever they actually happen to be so shift a add in an empty plane axes then we're going to come to our bezier curve which i'm actually going to relabel right now as mitochondria interior so grab that add another modifier this time it is a simple deform we're going to choose bend and then for the axis origin we're going to choose this empty for here we'll keep it at 45 to start but grab your empty and then hit r y and 90 degrees you can see this is actually rotating it or bending it rather across that axis the way we want we can also hit g and y with the empty selected to sort of control some of the stretch and scale of that for the time being i'm going to leave it in the center so at this point we have our screw modifier set up to achieve our shape from our curve which we can still edit we have our simple deform to give this slight bend effect we're going to add in a solidify modifier and the trick with this is that i want to actually solidify moving away from the interior so just grab that thickness value and drag it until you have something like this that's going to be pretty good you might notice some small shading defects in areas like this but usually those won't actually be visible in the final figure because nobody's going to be zooming in right to about here most of the time if you are well then it's still not that obvious so i wouldn't worry too much about it right click shade smooth and now we're in good shape at this point we can start making the actual shell that's going to go around our mitochondria and the way that we're going to do this is very similar to my previous tutorial on how to make a pill so simply hit shift a add in a mesh cylinder i'm going to change a few options here for starters i'm going to bring the number of vertices up to 64 and then i'm going to change the cap fill type from ngon to nothing hit 1 on your number pad to come into front view tab into edit mode z and drag to the side for wireframe and now still in edit mode hit shift a and add in a uv sphere i again want the segments to go up to 64 and then i'm going to hit g z hold down control and move up on my mouse until it snaps so that the center of the sphere matches the ring of vertices on the cylinder simply then drag a box over the bottom half of the vertices in the cylinder or in the sphere rather hit x and delete all those vertices we're also then going to drag a ring over here and we're going to hit m if you're using blender version 2.83 or further on or alt m if you're using 2.8 through 2.82 and you choose merge by distance and what that has done is it's made all the cylinder and sphere vertices the same from here ctrl r and add an edge loop right into the middle of the cylinder then drag a box over the bottom half and delete all those vertices tabbing back into object mode and coming to solid view you can see this is what we have is a end cap we'll add a modifier to this namely a mirror in the z direction and we will apply that then r y 90 degrees to rotate and you can see this is already almost in place to be our shell it might be tempting at this point to try and scale this out to fit by hitting s and x to drag in that direction but that's going to warp the sphere so you can scale uniformly by hitting s and dragging out until it's bigger if you really need it to be longer or shorter simply hit 7 for top view tab into edit mode z for wireframe and then drag out over all of these vertices g and x to move them something like this and matching thereabouts from here we will actually scale uniformly and the way that we're going to get this to match is apply another simple to form so simple to form bend choose the same empty and you can see it's warping this is very obviously not great because you have only one edge loop here so tab into edit mode ctrl r and drag out a good number of cuts let's say 10. do that on the other side as well and now that's a much smoother bend you can see of course that this is not exactly what we would necessarily hope for it's a little too big so scale in and this is something that's worth noting is i made this or i added the edge loops a little bit too soon so if i wanted to you should really try and get the size right first before you add the edge loops i have a few options here i could make the mitochondria interior a little bit bigger by scaling out like this with x and y or s and x or i could drag this in so i'm going to actually do that by dragging this in till just about here add this in until just about there now to improve this bend i'm going to add an extra set of edge loops here and here just to make that a little bit smoother so control r had a good number of edge loops there let's say seven and then on this side again we're looking roughly for equal size cuts so five in this case you can see now we have something a little bit smoother so if we come into object mode right click and shade smooth that's not bad our mitochondria is inside but right now we're going to focus on this little cylinder which is our mitochondria exterior so we'll rename that as well and we're going to make some changes for starters we're going to add another modifier namely a subdivision surface of two just to get it nice and smooth i'm also going to add a boolean so that we can cross-section this and see inside i'm going to make sure that i go to edit preferences add-ons and have something called bool tool enabled so this modifier right here or this add-on right here rather then shift a add in a cube hit g z drag it up and just scale it out on the y and a little bit on the x until it covers roughly the part that you'd like to cross section i'll hit g and x and drag it over to about here then i will first grab my cube shift and grab my mitochondria exterior and then hit ctrl and minus on my number pad that is how bool tool works to make that cut you'll notice that my cylinder is actually solid and i don't want that what i would like is for it to be a shell so i'm going to achieve that by adding a solidify modifier moving it above the boolean and again i'm going to drag the thickness out so that it goes wider so just about here if you clip your boolean which is what i did right there and you can see that just make the boolean cutter a little bit bigger so i'm happy with something roughly along the sides of that and i'll make sure that my boolean cutter is bigger by just scaling it on the y and moving it on the x just a little bit now let's do a few sandy checks here make sure that our interior fits inside we can also see that we're cutting perhaps a little bit too deeply so just grab your cube g and z to bring it up and now that's a little bit more in line roughly in plane if you notice that you have some interesting little shading defects on the edge of the cylinder simply come down to the object data properties for the mitochondria exterior object go to normals and check autosmooth and that'll clean those up right away right i'm almost happy with this but i actually do want to be a little bit bigger so i'm going to scale that on the x just to have it fit and i'll move it backwards on the x as well so that it fits in and that is looking pretty good from here we're going to do a few more small things and then we'll actually get started on doing material setup so i'm going to hide my cube for cutters you can actually see that was created by the bubble tool add-on and now i'm going to get the liquid effect that you have where sometimes you'll see mitochondria made with an interior liquid inside this membrane or even inside this bigger ring and we'll do both of those so simply select your mitochondria interior tab into edit mode you can see that we've got everything that we need here but what we want is essentially to use this curve exactly to fit this interior part so we're going to grab our mitochondria exterior shifty duplicate right click to drop it in place then we will come to the modifiers and we're going to actually get rid of all these modifiers we'll also hide the original interior just so that we can focus on what we're looking at right now and we're going to add in a mirror modifier we're going to mirror along the y axis not the x and we're going to enable clipping and merge now go ahead and apply this and you'll notice that you cannot actually apply it because it'll say transform curve to mesh that's fine that's actually what we're going to do so hit f3 or come to operator search and we're going to look for convert to and simply choose convert to mesh from curve meta service text once you've done that you can now see we have this mesh and if you hit tab to enter edit mode you'll notice all these vertices one thing that you want to do very quickly is make sure that these two are actually closed on this end and this end so drag a box over what looks like the vertices here see how many you have selected if it's 1 that's great and we're fine if it's 2 hit m alt m and just m or all 10 depending on the version of blender you're using and merge at center so if i was going to show you that it would be here and merge at center do the same thing for the one in the back just along the axis we need this to be a closed loop you can see right now that it's only one vert and so that's fine then a to select all the verts and f to join them all this is a giant mesh that is kind of a bit of a mess but it's actually going to do everything that we need because we're going to use materials so now what we're going to do is we're going to actually match this to the mitochondria interior and then using materials will make it look sort of transparent and a little bit like fluid so simply grab your mitochondria interior and we're actually going to rename this to mi liquid for mitochondria interior liquid add a modifier namely a simple deform again use the same empty change it to bend and you'll now see it maps into this area now this is the reason that we originally made the solidify go in the opposite direction if it were a shell that were coming in it would start to clip but if it goes out then we don't have that problem and it also gives us a little bit of leeway to grab this mi liquid mesh hit g z and drag it down just a little bit below the surface so now we have this nice effect here again we could do the same thing for the mitochondria exterior and i'll do that very quickly by hitting one on for front view tabbing into edit mode hitting two for edge select and choosing the edge that looks like it's roughly in the middle so hold down alt just click that edge so from here we're going to hit shifty drag that out right click to drop it back in place hit p and we're going to separate by selection then tab back into object mode grab this piece right here and we'll call this m e liquid for mitochondria exterior liquid we'll hide the exterior just so we can focus on this and we're going to get rid of all these modifiers once again same thing as before add a mirror modifier move it across the y axis apply it this time we don't have to convert because it's already a mesh and you can see that we can just simply hit 1 for vertex selection a to select everything and f to fill it similarly to match the mitochondria exterior which we'll bring back we're going to apply the same simple deform so a bend using that same empty and likewise with the interior we used a exterior solidify on this so that this fits in nicely and g and z to just bring it down just a little bit and we're going to use the same material setup for both of these to give the impression that this is transparent and liquid you'll notice right now that we have a little bit of clipping here i'm going to ignore that for the time being if it was something that was really bothering you you could fix it the problem is once you've got to this stage if you mix or mess with any of these you'll have to adjust all of them so one kind of easy way to fix that is just to parent them to each other and then you can use the parent object and scale so that's actually all right same for this one probably just a good idea so grab your mitochondria liquid then your mitochondria interior control p parent to object and this means that if we want to move this sort of by scaling it we could adjust that without having to worry about the liquid going haywire so that's all right i think what we see here is a little bit of clipping again we do see that so grab the cutter enable it and just move it over so that we don't have to worry about that so grab the cutter g and x and now we're not clipping anymore i actually just want this color to be a little bit longer something like that okay so now we're at the point where we can finally do all of the material setup and this is where it's really going to sell quite a lot of this effect if you're going to be working in ev for this enable ambient occlusion and screen space reflections also open this menu and enable refraction that's what we're going to use for the water and liquid effects just for convenience i'm going to hide this cube again so it's not in my way then i'm going to grab my mitochondria exterior and we'll start with the material for that simply come down to the material properties tab add a new material and i want my mitochondria to be blue i'm going to hit z and come into material preview and then i'd like my mitochondria interior to be i'm thinking kind of red purple today so let's go with something like this and to really make this a little bit better i'm going to add some amount of texturing through notes but for starters we'll just make this much much shinier by bringing the roughness down to 0.1 for both of these actually we'll go with point two when you go down below point two what can often happen if you're using an hdri is you'll see reflections from the world so you can see that with a roughness of zero i'm actually seeing the scene lighting that i'm using here which is this kind of forest environment but if i bring it down to about point two then that usually smooths it out or blurs it enough that you can't tell for the water we're gonna have to deal with something a little bit different so go ahead and either grab the water directly or come into whichever object you parented it to and grab it from there add a new material and we're going to do this by simply bringing the roughness down to about 0.1 dragging the transmission all the way up and for blend mode we're going to choose alpha blend for the first one for this one we're actually going to choose alpha hashed um you know what no we'll choose alpha ash so we're going to choose alpha hashed we're going to enable screen space refraction and right now you can't tell that's doing anything because there's this other obvious large white layer to fix that we're simply going to add the material for this liquid so again drag the roughness down to about 0.1 bring the transmission all the way up enable blend mode of alpha hashed screen space refraction enabled bring that distance up to 0.1 bring the distance up to 0.1 for both of them actually that's going to help you see inside and so now to make this a little bit better for starters we're going to distinguish them with colors so i will add a base color of sort of a blue matching the blue and then for this one for the interior liquid we're going to change that material to something a little bit more pink red reflecting the material of that component something like this is just fine now those are fine but they're not necessarily that interesting so we're going to drag out another window come to the node editor or the shader editor rather to improve this water effect we're going to start by just hiding the larger exterior liquid because it's sort of distracting we're going to focus on the interior one you can see i've got my nodes set up right here i'm going to simply grab this and making sure i have edit preferences add-ons nodewrangler enabled right here i'm going to grab this principled bsdf node hit ctrl t and that's going to bring up these nodes right here right now that's plugged into the base color i don't want that and i also want to use generated coordinates i'm going to grab this image texture hit shift s and i'm going to change it from an image texture to a musgrave from here i'll hit shift a add in a vector bump connect the factor into the height and bring the normal into the normal once that's done compiling you can see we now have this interesting liquid effect now that's a little bit strong and it's not exactly the way i want so we're going to change a few things we'll start rubbing the scale on the musgrave from five to ten i'm going to zoom in and that's not bad again the effect is strong so we'll bring the strength down to 0.1 much much better and if you're not happy with kind of the way that it's aligned you can affect that by simply coming to the scale values and changing the y or the x until it looks either a little bit smoother or a little bit denser but in the right direction so now we have our interior and we're just going to peruse that for a little bit you can see that it's reflecting nicely with the light we're actually in rendered view right now because i have set up the lighting for the scene using the same lighting as material preview so you can do either one but this is pretty good i'm going to now do the exact same thing for the interior for the exterior liquid so go ahead grab that same approach ctrl t drag all of these over generated into vector shift s to change the image texture to a musgrave drag that out of the color put it into a vector bump node connect the factor into the height the normal into the normal and again i have the options here to change scale so i'll bring this to 10 and this time i will absolutely use the y scale to spread that out just a little bit to make it bigger and drop the strength down to 0.1 something like that so this is pretty good i'm reasonably happy with this there's a few things that i want to change i do want my exterior shell to have a little bit more interest and actually i want it to use the exact same texture so i'm going to simply do exactly the same thing and i'll just fast forward this part so you don't want to once you have it set up like this this is where we actually are going to revisit this just so that i can dial this in a little bit bring the strength away down to about 0.05 actually no 0.1 and bring the scale up quite substantially here to maybe 25. in this case i'm actually going to use the z scaling to dial this in until it's just a little bit more uniform something like this that's pretty good and i think i'll make this shell no i'm reasonably happy with that so something like this is not bad you could get away with concluding this here we're going to do just a little bit more work in a few areas now something i've noticed that can be a little bit of an issue for the materials is that right now from this view you can see this kind of unusual edge lighting that you get on the liquid interior of the mitochondria so there is a very easy fix for that simply grab your liquid for mi interior and we're going to change the blend mode a bit so instead of alpha hashed we're going to use alpha blend we're going to uncheck screen space refraction and then we're going to actually use the alpha value and we're going to drag that down to about 0.65 get rid of or rather bring the roughness up to about 0.2 and that should solve some of our issues with that effect if that's not supremely obvious just go ahead and disable the exterior liquid you'll be able to see what i'm talking about a little bit better in fact better to likely change the setup for both so let's go with alpha blend for both drop to about 0.65 uncheck show backface we do not want showbackface for either of these and now in this case it's a little bit better you just don't have that same ring lighting effect and so i actually think that this is a better material setup this is the one that i'm gonna go with you can see from here that now i've got my mitochondria i've added in a few little uv spheres that's all they are just uv sears with a subdivision surface of one shaded smooth and a simple shiny red material so just red and then roughness point two and i've placed them throughout to kind of look nice inside the channel the only other thing that i would do from here is occasionally people add little spiral curves the easiest way that i've found to do that is come to edit preferences add-ons and then make sure you have add curve extra objects once you have extra curves enabled simply hit shift a add curve come down to curve spirals and i'm just going to go with archimedean change the number of turns to maybe three this is actually alright from there s shift z drag it in until you have something sort of helical down to the object data properties for curves go to geometry bring the bevel depth up until you have some thickness change the resolution so it's a little bit higher and then you can just scale that in you can tighten the coils by scaling in just the z direction and again i would just place a few of these in the mesh however i fancied so i'll go ahead and do that and then you'll be able to see the final product one thing that you may run into with these curves is the fact that because of the way this mesh is made it's going to intersect to fix that just hit tab to enter edit mode o to enable proportional editing grab any one of those verts and then just sort of drag it up and move it around however you want it's also a good way to add some variation into these little repeat features so that they look a little bit distinct as they move through i'm going to add a simple blue material to these ones so shiny blue roughness of about 0.2 and i'll make sure that this spiral has the same material there so this one way down here and you could add a few more of these if you wanted to move them in different directions by just grabbing them shift d moving out say over here and then again editing them kind of as you want with proportional editing grabbing any vert hitting g and with proportional enabled just sort of move it around so it looks sort of free-flowing and organic this one's probably going to be a little bit chaotic something like that so once you have all of those in place you can now change anything that you want about this relatively easily it's all built out of curves simple mesh the material setup actually adds quite nicely to the final look you can again change some of these color aspects if you want to be a little bit more distinct and this would be pretty much the final setup for render so you could go ahead grab your camera wherever that is right there and i'll just go ahead and move into roughly the view that i think is good so right about here ctrl alt number pad 0 and then just a g middle mouse button and adjust until you have something that you think you're pretty happy with from there go ahead and f12 to render and there we have our very very simple mitochondria you can improve this quite substantially if you're really willing to put in the time to get the materials just the way that you want or put in all the elements but this is the rough way to make this it can be a little bit of a lengthy process once you've got it done though you can largely duplicate these and use them in other places change the colors and so it's reasonably versatile one last thing to note if you wanted to animate this would be to simply grab the features that you want to have move usually these spheres or the spirals and then make sure that you actually do have the rotation applied so in this case you can see i rotated this quite a lot so ctrl a and apply rotation and we'll do that for the other spirals as well ctrl a sorry ctrl a apply rotation and then simply grab a spiral add a wave modifier change the height to a little bit lower bring the speed down and make the with uh we'll leave the width and narrowness the way they are and you can see from here what we could do is we could just play on the timeline and we would actually have this thing sort of moving around in a way that looks relatively organic if you do that for all of them then it tends to give a reasonably decent effect so as always thanks for coming out if you found this helpful or interesting or engaging please consider subscribing sharing with your friends and colleagues if you use this to make some figures i'd love to see them so i'm on instagram and twitter at cgfigures and until next time you have yourselves a great old day

Channel: CG Figures

Views: 6,430

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Id: 1hag-4lX_sA

Length: 31min 21sec (1881 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 25 2020