How to Make Phospholipid Bilayers and Cells in Blender

welcome back to another CG figures tutorial today I'm going to show you how to make phospholipids in blender and then turn them into a cell so go ahead and delete your default cube and replace it with an eco sphere we're gonna make sure this eco sphere has four subdivisions and then we'll come to front view by hitting one on the number pad zoom in tab into edit mode hit alt a to deselect everything and then making sure you're selecting verts grab one vert here and one vert just about there holding down shift so that you can grab both hit ctrl + once and that will select the extended hexagons we're then going to come into a perspective view hit E to extrude and pull out till just about there it s Y and 0 to flatten those and then extrude a few more times once twice and just about three times there we go we're gonna start shading and adding modifiers pretty much immediately because there's some defects that we have to touch on so right-click and shade smooth come over to the modifier properties tab and add in a subdivision surface of one you can also keep it to one in the render because you won't really need too many these are going to be quite small in the final scene now this is going to be our polar head and these will be our nonpolar tails and so we need these to have different materials go ahead and start by adding in one material I'm going to call this blue and we'll just use that for the head of the material will shift into material preview mode and we want these tails to be red so I'm going to add a second material with the plus sign here and we'll just make this a very simple red to assign it to these tails we'll tap back into edit mode and you can see we've already got these faces selected so hit ctrl + once twice three times until we have just about this selected go ahead now and click assign with the red material and you'll notice our problem right away if we zoom in you can see there's this ugly little shading problem so we're gonna fix that come to edit mode and hit ctrl R to put a loop cut just about here on your tail bring it right in and if you were to bring it all the way and you'd see we'd get this kind of hexagon which is not quite what we want so drag it to just about here and then on the other side hit three for face select alt and click on one of these vertical or rather horizontal edges once you've done that you'll see it selects all the faces around there we're going to come to the blue material and now we'll assign the blue material and you can see what that's done is that it's extended to blue just a little bit out because of the subdivision so hit 2 for edges alt and click this edge again and then double tap G so that you can slide that up once you've done that ctrl R in the middle of the red section and then just drag this in again and now we actually have a much smoother more circular looking edge just like that so we'll go ahead and do the same thing on the other side tap back into edit mode ctrl R in the middle here to add the loop cut bring it in three or face select alt and there assign the blue material put another loop cut into the red section and drag that in until it's closer to the body we can also drag this edge in by double tapping G again just to get it a little bit closer and so that's going to give us our basic phospholipid our polar head and our nonpolar tail now this is a little bit boring we want to add some interest to it so we're going to go ahead tab into edit mode and hit Z and come into wireframe and just draw boxes over these come into a perspective view and hedgy and just move around a little bit these don't have to be perfect and they don't have to look like anything in particular you want this to just be a little bit disordered to kind of show something that's free-floating and that should do fine you can also move them up and down if you want now this is a phospholipid we're going to call it that however when we want to make a sell or use the Sun particle system we need a phospholipid bilayer namely two so the way that we're going to do that is tap into edit mode it a to select everything shift D to duplicate it in edit mode it Y to lock it in the y axis drag it out until just about here then hit our X and 180 degrees to spin it around G Y and bring it further out and if you want you could also now on the other side again grab these move them around a little bit and this will just be for a little bit of visual interest so that's going to be just fine I'm going to use these as my phospholipids you'll notice right now that the center of mass for this is located in the first ecosphere so if we were to try and rotate it would rotate around that area we actually want to be between the two so we're just going to right click and for set origin we're going to go with origin two geometry and now you can see that we rotate again we're rotating about the midsection awesome grab that move it out of the way and that is going to be our phospholipid for creating our cell okay so the last cell that I tried to make there were just too many particles with subdivisions and it didn't actually record so we're going to do so a little differently I've just disabled the subdivision surface on the phospholipids and we're now going to make our cell so shift a add in a nycos fear make sure it has about five subdivisions we want to be pretty close packed hit one to come into front view zoom in and then tab to edit mode z wireframe and drag a box over the top half of the vertices hit X and delete those vertices we now have the bottom half of nightosphere with 1321 vertices you do want to use a microsphere over say UV sphere because this is going to give kind of the highest density of closest packed verts and that's going to make the particle system look better so tab into object mode come to particle properties and then add in a new particle system namely a hair particle system with 1321 for the number we're going to omit from the verts check the modifier stack and uncheck random order for render as we're going to use object and then the object that we're going to use is of course our phospholipid you can see that's way too big so we'll bring that down to just about 0.01 and that is not bad so in material preview mode we can see there is our basic cell we're going to uncheck show emitter for both render and viewport display and now the ICO sphere is hidden but we can see all of our phospholipids forming that nice phospholipid bilayer and making a cell like object there are two quick little things that we're going to do here just to improve this and one is we're going to come up to the Advanced Options in particle settings we're then going to enable rotation increase the phase an increase randomized phase so you can now see all the little tails have started to twist so that they are sort of intermeshed in a more random chaotic way that makes it a little bit more believable from here the last thing we're going to do is remember we enabled the modifier stack so we're going to come back add a modifier and the modifier we're going to add is a displacement we'll put that above the particle settings add a new texture and then come down to the texture properties tab and choose clouds now this is obviously chaotic but we're going to bring that size up to about 2.3 to start and then we'll adjust the size just a little bit until you see the spheres start to look a little bit more cooperative and we're also going to come and adjust the strength and we'll bring that down until it's a bit more subtle so now we have something that's a little distorted and also has the particles in the right place the last thing that we can do is just try and use the normal arrangement for the orientation axes and that will actually clean this up just a little bit further once all that's done you now have your basic cell so we have our phospholipids we have them arranged in a Cell you can change the colors at any time by coming to the materials you can change the cell size by scaling it up and then adjusting the scale of the phospholipids in the particle settings appropriately to match and of course you can also change the displacement very subtly by just warping it here with the strength for either a perfect circle or something a little bit more distorted and you can again change the displacement there the only other thing that we can do that I like to do at least for this is if you want you can add in a wave modifier put that it above the particle system and then you can just go ahead and hit play here and you'll see that the cell will actually oscillate if we disable one axis we can get to wave across and if you freeze frame it on any particular moment you might get something a little interesting and you know change the height to make it a bit more subtle so as always thanks for coming out if you found this useful consider subscribing and sharing with your friends and colleagues and until next time have yourself a great old day

Channel: CG Figures

Views: 5,880

Keywords: Blender, Science, Cells, CGFigures

Id: LEmQoIxtbcQ

Length: 8min 53sec (533 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 11 2020