I am working on a medical project where I want to visualise cell division that behaves like a chain reaction. ie once a cell is divided, the children and the parent continuous to divide and so on… The cell need to have a nucleus also.
At the same time, if these cells collide each other or comes in contact with a boundary,then it should behave like a soft body.
(its like a single cell in a closed glass bottle starts multiplying and filling the bottle eventually)
And also it would be better if we can have the control of when the cell division starts and stops/slow down.
But metaballs only solves part of the problem. Metaballs are an obvious way to make a cell division effect, but how would one make a soft body effect between them after? The metaballs would have to be made small enough that they don’t connect back after separating, then somehow have their geometry inflated until they touch (maybe by baking them to a mesh sequence?), then somehow make their surfaces squish at contact points (with everything we have said, physics won’t work, so it would have to somehow be done either with materials or geometry nodes).
Honestly, I have a hard time seeing how this can even be done in Blender, at least without sacrificing at least one of the criteria.
Thanks for your time buddy, this took me halfway there. But the main issue I have to figure out is how to give softbody simulation at the same time for the cells.
I will post here if I ever figure out this.
Hi, @albinthomas - did you ever figure out how to create cell division, but with soft body simulation so the cells repel each other? I’m also working on a similar project but I’m manually animating all the divisions with metaballs and it’s taking forever! I was hoping by now there was a nifty addon or geometry node set up that would automatically do this for me
Did you ever crack the secret method for this type of simulation?
Thank you!
@RSEhlers thanks so much!! I spent two days googling for something like this and never found that addon - it’s so perfect!!
Can’t wait to test it out!
Thanks again!
@MedicalArtCS Sorry to say that I still haven’t found a way to do this in Blender (Still searching for a solution). Maybe geometry nodes might have made it possible nowadays but I’m not quite sure about that.
@RSEhlers This addon looks good but it seems very specific and particular. What I’m looking for is more like an organic and random movement of cells in the space and then multiplying. Also as said, If they have collision with each other and\ boundaries, would be nice.
Please have an update in this thread if anyone ever figure this out. Thanks.
interesting… searching for blender geometry nodes metaball gives me:
