This post tidies up some loose ends about making movies of muscle sarcomeres in POV-Ray. I blogged earlier about
Putting all these techniques together allowed me to render an image of chain of sarcomeres.
The most difficult part here was defining the geometry and making sure that I was drawing each object in the correct x,y,z location. I automated this process using MATLAB. The whole scene is made up of spheres, cylinders, and boxes. A few objects are merged together as blobs.
Once I had that working for a single image, I just moved the camera around the scene until I had a sequence that I thought looked interesting. Then I rendered the images (it took a few hours on my PC) and stitched the sequence together to make a movie.
Here's the final result.
I am happy to share the code but it may take me some time to get it posted online. If you want to get it sooner, just send me a note via a comment below.
