POVRay sarcomeres - final touches

This post tidies up some loose ends about making movies of muscle sarcomeres in POV-Ray. I blogged earlier about

• POVRay
• How to describe and render a simple image
• How to make an animation

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.

Word clouds

A quick aside - I will get back to POV-Ray soon.

I wanted to make a Word Cloud for something at work. I've never done this before so I adopted my usual strategy - look in the MATLAB FileExchange to see if somebody has already created a tool.

As is nearly always the case, I found something useful, WordData Visualization. It was even a Pick of the Week back in 2015.

Five minutes later, and I had what I wanted. Then I went on to generate a figure based on the text from my PhD thesis. It doesn't get much more exciting :-)