Nature is a magazine and website published by the Nature Publishing Group. Today I got an email from Jos Stam. Jos is a member of the Autodesk Research team, and his research spans several areas of computer graphics: natural phenomena, physics-based simulation, rendering and surface modeling, especially subdivision surfaces.
Jos shared the following Nature article:
According to Senior Principal Research Scientist, Dr. Erin Bradner: "Awesome paper. Very well written. I love seeing these tools used to simulate bacterial colonization, especially since Autodesk Within Medical prints titanium medical implants. The Autodesk Maya visualizations give a great sense of the relative size of the titanium surface features and those teeny tiny bacterium."
Jos is the brains behind the Nucleus simulation engine that allows designers to experiment with "form-finding" in the conceptual design phase. The Nature article highlights its inclusion in Autodesk Maya as applied to working with bacterium. Whereas the Nucleus engine has always allowed Maya to be great for creating effects like hair and cloth in such blockbusters as Avatar and Tintin, it's rewarding to see Autodesk products like Maya being used to advance the science of medicine and biology in general.
Check out this visualization:
And speaking of Nature, Software Architect, Michael Zyracki, pointed out that there's another article featuring some research out of MIT for 4D Printing using Nucleus and Autodesk's Project Cyborg.
In this second article, Nucleus is used to model self-evolving structures that know how to morph into an overall predetermined shape.
Visualization is alive in the lab.