Guest Tutorial: Dr. Jeroen Claus – Rendering The Corona Virus’ Spike Protein

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You asked us how to visualize the corona virus, but we’re by no means biologists… So we went out (Only virtually of course – we’re still curfewed as of today.) and found someone who is more qualified than us to cover that task.

May we introduce to you: Dr. Jeroen Claus of Phospho, a biologist and expert in visualizing molecular structures.

In this video, Jeroen covers what’s needed to import and animate SARS-Cov-2’s spike protein aka “the virus nubbins”.

RCSB’S Corona Virus Resources Page

Download Project File

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8 Comments

  1. This is soooo sick – with some surprisingly simple vex for cleaning up the data.

    If anyone has megascans, you can quickly scatter these little bastards over a large sphere with the quixel quick scatter node and get them to animate. They can be distributed over the sphere based on the sphere’s normals, as well. Just a little tip.

    Thanks Doc!

    • Nice one! Actually you can do it with built in tools just as well: Scatter SOP + Copy to points set to packed instancing 🙂

      Cheers, Mo

    • Thanks Mark! And the data cleaning gets even easier if you’re lucky enough to find two datasets that have perfectly matching atom counts. It sometimes happens when they’re relatively small proteins and are from the same paper (so same scientist preparing the files). In those cases, it’s just a matter of immediately dropping down that blend shapes node and happy days.

  2. Mark Illing

    Thank you for this really excellent tutorial. You did a great job at putting this together and making it easy to follow.

    Once I finished this tutorial I attempted to export the model as an alembic cache. For some reason though, I was only able to get Chain B to export properly, while the other two Chains don’t seem to register. Do you have any idea how I might be able to fix this issue?

    Thank you

  3. hey, unfortunately I can’t download the file when clicking the link. Could you possibly re upload it? Thank you for delivering such great content!

    • Done – it was a matter of Chrome blocking non-https links 🙂 Cheers, Mo

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