Hi, this is how I made my microbe for the microbe coursework. There are thousands of ways you could do it, I just liked to do it this way!

This microbe is made using Blender, and Photoshop CS5 Portable (White Rabbit for those who call it that =D). Both are free to download.

Part 1: The render

Step 1: Make an icosphere
Hit [SPACE] in the 3d window, and then hover over to add, mesh, icosphere and click!

Then select 1 for the subdivide
You will get something like this



Step2: Modifiers
While you have your sphere selected, look down to your buttons window. In your buttons window at the bottom of the screen you will see some buttons! Click to this window, and then click the modifiers button, and create a subsurf for your sphere, use the settings as shown.

And you will see this in your 3d window

I decided that wasn't enough subsurf, so I did the same thing again, and got this

I then created a decimate modifier and applied it, to get the poly count back down

Why did I do this? well, just look at how the faces are now, they are all random and crazy. Back on the sphere before they were nice and clean. Microbes aren't all that orderly, so the decimate will make it look crazier.

The next thing I did was to hit the Set Smooth button, show here

Now your sphere will look pretty



Step 3: Materials
I hit over to the materials window, and created a new material. I made it green and added some toon shading. The colour doesn't matter, you can change it latter if you don't like it.


I then clicked over to the textures window, and created a new texture of type Voroni

Then I clicked to the colours, and hit the colourband button, so I could change it up.
Here is what it looked like once I had changed it

All I did was make the right bit white!

Then I made some more changes, moving the bit on the right all the way to the left, and making it black, and moving the bit on the left to the middle.

The preview isn't very useful, it just shows it as all black.
But if you click back to the materials panel you can see it now has black spots!

Back in the materials panel, I changed the Map To to Disp (I also had Col selected too, but on the image it isn't. Ignore that, select Col aswell).


Hit F12 and get a nice test.

Pretty bumpy ey? We probably want less bumps than that.
Luckily all we need to do is scale the texture.

I put it to .75, so now the bumps will be bigger.

Now my render looks like this


Now to work on those colourful bright spots. The first thing to do is make another voroni texture, but use these settings instead:

Heading back to your materials you will see it now has nice bright lines all over it, and such.
Looks cool, but not what we want!
This here is what we want;

(NOTE: This time Col should not be selected!)

Now you can see all those bright spots on it ey? Do a test render if you want. And adjust the scale. I set my scale to 1.5 for all of them, so I got more spots.

Once you have played with that a bit, its time for some sub surface scattering!
I selected whole milk as my base, then changed the colour to bright green, and the scale to 0.200.

Here is what my preview now looks like


But I noticed last time I rendered that the bumps looked kinda lame, so I went back to my modifiers and added another subsurf, but didn't click apply this time.


Now my render looks like this



Step 4: Lighting
I went back to my 3D window and created another icosphere, as I did at the start. This time I scaled it to about 2-3, so it encased my other icosphere, with some space to spare.

Then I created a new sun lamp (space -> add -> lamp -> sun). With that new sun lamp selected, I held shift and right clicked on the icosphere I had just created, then I hit ctrl+P to parent the light to the icosphere.

With this new icosphere selected, I clicked over to the properties, and hit 'Wire' (so that the icosphere will display in wireframe), and 'Duplifaces' (so that the sun lamps will now shoot out from each of the sphere's faces).

This is called 'approximated global illumination'. Its pretty neat, making some nice lighting and such.

Here is how my screen looked now.

Go back and select your sun lamp, and change the settings a bit

Turn on ray trace, and turn the sun power down a lot. If you left it at 1 then things would be very bright and washed out, try it :P

Once I changed my settings, here is what I was rendering




Step 5: Ready for the render
Select your camera, and if you havn't already, move it so that you get a nice big view of your microbe.
Then with it selected, go to the editing panel (F9), and then hit Mist


Now go to your world settings, and turn on mist, and change the background colour to black.


And adjust the mist start and distance so that it looks something like this

See how the mist starts just after the object starts, and ends a bit after half way? The start is pretty important, and the end should be between half way and the end of the object.

Now go to the render panel, and set the start and finish both to 1, and the file type to PNG, and click argb (makes it render with transparent background)


Hit the giant ANIM button to render!
Here is what I got



Next, go back and turn on EMIT on the second texture (so it has yellow text saying EMIT), and change the start and finish values on the render panel to 2.
Now hit the ANIM button to render!
I got this;


Now, go back to your materials, and change the settings; removing EMIT and TRANS from the second material, and COL from the first material.
Change the materials colour to white, and hit the shadeless button, and unclick the Shadow button. It should now look like this

Go to your render panel, and change the start and finish values to 3.
Here is what I got.


You should now have 3 files in the folder you rendered to (if you are not sure where you rendered too, look to the left of the render panel, under 'output', the first folder is where it will save them too).
Those three files are 0001.png, 0002.png and 0003.png. The 3 renders we did.


Part 2: Post processing
Load up all 3 images in an image processing program of your choice, I chose Photoshop CS5 portable (A free download, and anyone who doesn't have it should).
Here are my 3 layers chilling. Notice I have made certain they line up properly.


I then set the second layer (the bright layer that we rendered with EMIT on) to Overlay blend style, and also added in a black background (just because I like to see it while I work)


I then clicked over to the channels tab, and clicked create new channel at the bottom, I named this channel Alpha 1 (the default name), and pasted in the third render we did, the black and white one. This will act as our Z-map

Then I made sure it lined up properly with the other layers (you will be able to see plainly if it doesnt line up). Mine did, yay!


I then quickly merged my green layers


Then I went to filters, blur, lens blur, and used the following settings. Note that I selected the source for the depth map as 'Alpha 1', and also hit Invert. (depth maps usually have black as close, and white as far. Ours is backwards, so we invert!)


Then I googled 'underwater' and found this, looks pretty nice ey? I put it in the back.


But it was a bit sharp, so I blurred it down. Remember that when stuff is really small the depth of field is small too, so only a small amount will be in focus. The background certainly won't be!



I then did some quick adjustments on my microbe, using brightness and contrast (this step is optional, you could also edit the levels or curves). Remember that you don't need to get the colour, contrast and exposure exactly right when you render, you can change it in post processing.


I also changed the hue and saturation a bit



Then I duplicated my microbe, and made them smaller. I touched up the black spots in the middle (they were very recognisable, and made it obvious that they were clones), and blurred them (further away = more blurry!)



And there we have it, the final piece!

Genius! Pure genius!

Oh, and great Tut

Extremely helpful

Love it! Great tutorial thanks Gorman!.

Good job, Gorman!!

Great use of Noise textures to create details in a simple object! Adding more layers at varying opacities and sizes should add even more detail, and make it look even more realistic.

I do have one question though; If you were going to make them blue anyways (I'm guessing this was done spur of the moment though) why not render the 'microbe' with alpha maps matching the color map, and with a transparent background? Would probably render faster, and enable faster transition to the bg in photoshop.

Because it wouldn't make a difference? :3
I don't understand what you mean by 'alpha maps matching the color map'. The depth map is effectively an alpha map, and to do an alpha matching the colour, wouldnt that mean manipulating the colour map that I am rendering anyway? :|

using the distortion map as an alpha would've created transparencies in the microbe bumps themselves, making for a more realistic piece. More or less it would be a hassle simply because you would have to edit the blurriness and strength of the alpha to make it realistic to the max, but I think it'd be worth a shot! This is all based of imagination, haven't actually tried it, might not look good at all, but you never know, crazier shit has happened.