Medical Illustration - HIV

[SeanL]

Peter,

This is an exciting visual to complement a lecture. Really interesting.

Four crits:

1. In the largest image the cross sectional plane is perpendicular to the camera...this makes the 3D look 2D. Try a 45 deg. or so view.

2. You've keyed it using color coding. Indicator lines going from text to the various components will reduce amount of time the audience requires to understand the slide (keep colors as they provide good contrast between components). Create these lines in post when you do the text.

3. The RNA looks too similar to the scaffold protein, in color and texture.

4. You spelled scaffold protein incorrectly (?).


I think the membrane looks convincing. It looks like by making the lipids transparent you solved the problem of intersecting meshes.

Can you give details as to how you did the modeling?

S

[JIII]

yea dude.

That is DAMN good I don't know enough about DNA RNA and STDS RBDS RGBA HSV and all those other nasty strains.

I love the way it looks though.

[JoelOtron]

Looks beautiful.

I thought the capsid was elongated rather than spherical in HIV, but I might be thinking of another virus (and I'm sure you know what you're talking about if ou are a professor).

(EDIT: Maybe thats what you meant by "un-truncated?)

If you are using this as a slide in a lecture, I think what you have done is fine and good. I might have used "blow-up" zoom lines coming from the correct areas in the main image to the closeups. to tie them together more. But that might also make the image look a bit busy.

Also maybe somehow using a lightsource to cast a shadow on the inner bilayer wall on the left to add more dimension to and it look concave. But that can be hard when using fresnel in the luminosity channel as shadows tend to not show up well.

[ndat]

Hey thats pretty nice :)

In my eyes everything is great you did an excellent job of composing the image. Its of profesional illustration quality, the only thing that brings it down in my book is the text, it needs to have better structure and compisition, and maybe think of an san serif font instead.

As for the structure of the virion, I always expected it to have more of a pronounced tri sphere effect. but I'm not able to explain it and it probally came from an outdated pic, so its probally wrong :).

Hmmm... not much else :) keep up the good stuff I like to see biology in art, I havent figured out the connection yet but it seems alot of bio people are involved alot with art.

Well cheers Its a good image I hope it serves you well :) -- ndat

[JoelOtron]

I actually gave HIV a shot a few weeks ago. Its really a work in progress as I got the capsid wrong (fiddled in photoshop) and I think there are too may surface proteins. Just thought I'd share since its on topic.

HIV test (http://joeldubin.net/HIV.jpg)

Yours of course, is more comprehensive, and more accurate. Mine was inspired by the Dorling Kindersly eyewitness book series "epidemic" which has some nice photographs of real plastic 3d models of various viruses etc.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0789462966/qid=1064202113/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/104-8735610-2716700?v=glance&s=books

[SteveB]

These are wonderful! As mentioned - professional quality. One crit - and its purely on the overall layout/graphics of the slide, you gotta change that font! Arial or anything is better than Times!!

[rirad]

Could you post a wire frame? I am very interested how you faked the bilipid membrane. I like the picture.

[Peter C.]

Thanks everyone!

SeanL: I created one with a 45 degree cut, but I prefere this as the straight angle gives a better illustration of the components, and that the shaders does give it a 3d apperance at this angle. Also, thank for the heads up on the misspelling on scaffold, I always write it wrong =P

JoelD: Your correct with the elongation, thats exactly what I ment with leaving it "untruncated". In reality, the capsid is not a perfect icosachedral, its a truncated cone structured nucleocapsid. I also wanted blowup lines, but it swamped the image too much, and I prefere to actively describe illustrations when holding a seminar (and Im only a PhD student so far =). About the lightsource, you right that it's difficult with the fresnel, but I think its a matter of tweeking the gradient in the transparance channel. BTW, cool HIV particle!

ndat: Yes, I do need another font, and as you stated, a sans serif if more easelly read. Thow, I dont know wether I should use a softer color. About the structure, you very much correct as the membrane is slightly wrapped asound the capsid which is truncated, but this is a simplefied illustration to show more the inner components.

SteveB: Yepp, I'll change it

rirad: I added a wireframe bellow. The bilayer was made using a 12 sided sphere where two poly's were extruded to give the two non-polar tails. I then duplicated it and turned the tails against each other. Then I duplicated them with an array for the crossection.

The whole particle was modeled with primitives, made editable, some crumbled and hyperNURBE'd, so its all pretty simple.

Thank you all for the feedback!!! :beer:

http://www.dez3d.com/Bilder/HIVwire.jpg

[rirad]

Thanks. The render fooled me. I thought there were at least 2 lipids behind each other.

[flingster]

wow is that what it looks like in 3d...wacky!
cool work...my only comment would be the same as ndats...basically font/text brings the whole thing down...as if someone made the 3d part then just slapped on some labels...that said don't go over the top as it is for an illustrative purpose...i would have a thin ring/border around the insert images the same colour as my text also..:thumbsup:

[Peter C.]

Ok, I have re-rendered it with the core slightly truncated and reworked the design. I tried to have circles around the areas that I enlarge, but it swamped my images too much, and besides, its more intuitive if you have to search for the areas =P

Cheers! :arteest:

Peter C.

http://www.dez3d.com/Bilder/HIVnew.jpg

[JIII]

I hate to say it but why didn't you make it look this good in the first place?

My god thats so much better.

Only problem is that the small text seems to be sacrificing beauty, for readability.

[JoelOtron]

Looks great. I'm a big fan of the drop shadow effects in photoshop. I would apply that effect to each item and make it soft, light, and subtle (not pure black with hard edges)--to pop the items from the background a bit. The core looks much better--and more organic.

[Anadin]

Yeah, much better this time, maybe put a subtle drop shadow on the text and the circles.

[Peter C.]

Thanks, and Im asking myself that same question JIII =P

This was made in PSP 8, and the drop shadow effect on the title was made manually using two layers of the text. I had to resize it for this post so the text quality may be comprimized a bit, but the original its very good. I didn't want to add more effects as I tried to keep it as clean as possible.

Thanks again for all the feedback!!! :beer:

[JoelOtron]

Thought I'd meddle with your file anyway
:)

http://joeldubin.net/HIVnew_meddle.jpg

[Peter C.]

Ok, THAT looks much better JoelD. How do you do that?

[JoelOtron]

Assuming your virus and blowups are on a separate layer, just double click on that layer in the layer pallette and your effects pallette comes up. (alternatively, you can go in the layer menu at the top of the screen to find the layer effects).

Click on drop shadow and adjust the width of the shadow in the controls so the shadow becomes soft. Play with the opacity of the shadow and make sure the direction of the shadow is cast to the lower right. You can play with the shadow distance a bit too.

I'd send you the PSD file but I didnt save it.

:shrug:

[AdamT]

Very nice work Peter, and a great improvement by Joel--the PS maestro. :thumbsup:

[Peter C.]

Ok, I managed to do the drop shadow effect, and its really looking good now.

Thanks again!!! :thumbsup:

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