Nanoparticles in Anti-cancer Drug Delivery MOA
Date
Dec. 2021
Client
Photoacoustic Imaging and Diagnostic Group
Dept. of Electrical & Computer Engineering at UIUC
Audience
Educated audience without professional biomedical background
Software
3D Studio Max, ZBrush, AfterEffects, Medica Encoder, Protein Data Bank, VMD, VRay renderer
Project Details
This narrative 3D animation explains the researchers’ proposed concept of how novel nanoparticles deliver anti-cancer drugs to cure cancer. The challenge of this project is how to explain the complex mechanism of action of nanoparticles to engineering scientists who have no biomedical background.
Process
Research
Accuracy is always my first goal. I focused on the scale relationships between nanoparticles and proteins, molecular interaction, cell morphology. Protein Data bank, SWISS-MODEL, and VMD are used for obtaining accurate molecule information. Fluorescence microscopy images and electron microscope images are used to understand tumor and macrophage morphology.
Script & Storyboard
Since this is a proposed research idea, another challenge is explaining the story thoroughly and protecting the novelty of the research idea in private. I was aware that the script and visual clues didn’t disclose the important information. After discussing with my content expert, Bing-Ze Lin, multiple times, we decided the visual story focused on the delivery process and omitted the anti-cancer drug details.
Animatic
Then, I created the animation draft, animatic, to determine the camera movement and narration timing before being finalized.
Simulation
This animation is heavily based on an event-based particle system, tyFlow. The nanoparticles, tumor cells, cells ground, and lipid bilayers are created in 3dsMax with tyFlow. I found an effective workflow to represent nanoparticles by iterative experiment and animation test in the early stage.
Compositing
Rendering 3D animation without a render farm is a challenge. To reduce the render time and save computer power, utilizing post-production in After Effects to achieve a similar visual effect is key.
I rendered one nanoparticle and used the Trapcode suite in AfterEffect to create the nanoparticle group in the background.
I also added cytokines (green particles) in the 3D space by taking RPF camera information from 3dsMax. Depth of Field was created based on Z-depth pass and object ID.
Final Product Gallery
