Christiaan Spieker, PhD student at the Computational Science Lab, together with colleagues at the Visualisation Lab won the first ‘Student Visualisation Competition” held at the “CompBioMed 2023″ conference in Munich. The image entitled ‘Cinematic punctured vessel blood flow simulation visualisation” uses simulation data produced by the Computational Science Lab. The image was produced by a joint effort from Christian Spieker, Joey van der Kaaij, David de Kanter, Robert Belleman, Gábor Závodszky, and Alfons Hoekstra.
The creation process of the image begins with raw blood cell simulation data in XMF and HD5 format, which is converted into mesh data (the X3D format) with the help of Paraview. The meshes are imported into Blender. Meanwhile, a cylinder is modeled in ZBrush to represent the blood vessel and further textured in Adobe Substance Painter to put a realistic-looking skin on the model. This textured model is subsequently imported into Blender alongside the blood cell models.
Once the components are in Blender, the scene is rendered using the Cycles rendering engine to produce an image of the blood vessel and blood cells. The final stage involves the import of the rendered image into Adobe Photoshop, where an appropriate background environment for the blood vessel is created, and some touchups are made to improve the overall visual appeal of the image. This comprehensive pipeline blends raw data conversion, 3D modeling, texturing, rendering, and post-processing to generate a detailed and realistic image of blood cells in a blood vessel.
