A Liquid Crystal Sphere

In my previous post I presented the general model of cylindrical crystals rotating within a confined lattice. However, without prior knowledge of what I’ve been working on, the model doesn’t really convey too well how this rotation looks like in a crystallite. So, in today’s post I take the model I used in the “Collapsing a Cylinder-Sphere” and “The Trypolite Crystal” posts and make the cylinders rotate.

The major practical difference is that the models in my previous posts were static, and I generated motion by rotating them around in PowerPoint. But this time I need to render the rotation of individual cylinders in Blender. Also, I needed to figure out a good angle to have the camera and plenty of appealing light sources, so that the model didn’t look bland. In my first iteration I decided not to move the camera but then decided to add a moving camera. I’m not sure whether it’s a good idea or whether it distracts one from observing the rotation of the cylinders.

One of the things to solve was the issue of seeing the rotation well. In my previous post I added a small bump to the cylinders, but the idea doesn’t really work with a large collection of cylinders, where the camera needs to be zoomed out, making individual bumps too small to see well. In my previous post I entertained the idea of marking the edge of the cylinder by some means, but I realized that the easiest way to see the rotation is to make the cylinder out of two halves with clearly different colorings. Because I didn’t want to change the actual color, I ended up just coloring the second half with a much darker shade of the same color. This seems to work well, if I say so myself.

I didn’t like the dark grey background from my previous post, so I introduced a dark green plane below the model. Perhaps not the best option, but I think it’s an improvement. And after rendering, I searched from sound libraries for a proper rolling sound and added it for a full audiovisual experience.

And here is how it looks and sounds like: 

https://video.wixstatic.com/video/ed0781_a7bf90b5787f4d0b9bd79e8e4e651e56/1080p/mp4/file.mp4

The first iteration took about 15 minutes to render, which is less than I feared. This iteration took perhaps a bit longer but was still reasonably fast. Visually this is possibly one of the coolest models that I’ve made, although there are some pretty cool contenders in my older posts, where I also had Blender renderings. Although now that I’m making cool videos again, I know I could make this much better. This is definitely still an early edition.

Just to recap, this is the unit crystallite that consists of cylinders all oriented parallel to each other in a spherical liquid crystal. And to form a whole spherical crystal, you need six of these circular crystallites to make a sphere.