I want to make a huge strand of DNA for credits of a short movie my friends and I are doing. Perhaps I’m too ambitious, but I want to have the camera fly through and the “connecting” molecules, every so often, will be the name of an actor. Kind of like spiderman, or war of the worlds… The problem is, I don’t have the experience to know how. I just read the toturial on dupliverts, and I thought I’d just make a big, spining path, and then create like on section and make it follow the path. From there I could edit in names… How should I start though?
I didn’t make this.
there is more than 1 way to approach this… read through this thread for a few of them
https://blenderartists.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=42140&highlight=dna
search for DNA here at elysiun if you are not satisfied with those techniques…
Already Searched “dna”
maybe you need to go screw:
http://mediawiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual/PartII/Basic_Mesh_Modelling
That is whayt I thought… I’d screw the first section, then make that section dupliverts anlong a path.
You go screw, foul monkey 
oh! sorry if that came out wrong… %|
guess i should have mentioned screwing first. kevsterb007’s idea of doing one section and dupliverting it sounds very reasonable.
…dirty stinking APES! :<
(LOL…Charlton Heston)
He does stink…
Model 1 section and duplicate…simple
You could duplivert / screw the bars and have the outside parts just be a shape lofted along a curve.
I suppose the bigger question is how you want the final to look. If you don’t mind the bars being separated from the main object then you have a lot more options.
Personally I’d make one section by hand, using standard poly modeling techniques (low poly), then I’d simply copy and paste it down and then use merge vertices. You could do it easily if you planned out your start and end points for the outside twisting lines and made it so that they line up when you copy and paste your sections.
Around this time of year things are hard to do… I’ll post as soon as I have the first section completed.
This topic really got to me… (I don’t know how to say it in english but in Japanese it’s ki ni haita). Anyway, I made a video demonstrating a possible start for the techniques you’ll need. It’s at:
http://ministryofdoom.org/cloud/blender/videos/dna-minitute1.mp4
It’s H.264, so you’ll need QuickTime 7 to play it. I apologize in advance if that’s difficult for you, but it’s the only compressor I use these days because the quality is unmatched for the size. I made a few mistakes (it’s a quicky and I’m suffering from a 14-hour jetlag right now), but overall I think it shows the idea.
If anything’s totally unintelligible let me know and I’ll post more here, but I won’t be re-recording this; it was just a quick demo to show you the way. But like I said I’m jetlagged (just moved from Tokyo to Toronto) and encoding the video took up a good chunk of my morning on my tiny laptop. ^-^;
Hope it helps.
edit: Incidentally, it’s 13.5 minutes long and about 24 meg.
This is the basic outside structure. One phosphate, one suguar. Sugar is the large one (will be red) phosphate is smaller (will be white). I want to repeat those along that curve (that curve is a path). How do I make it follow that path, and repeat? Like dupliverts, kind-of.
I want it to look like this, but this is just duplicated and rotated…
This is as far as I can get with the double helix structure. You can see, some sections the red points outward, some it points inward. I always want it to point outward, not twist to face the center. Is there some way I can fix that?
I’ll email you the .blend if you want it. The dof effect was just gimped in.
No, thanks. I’d like ths sides to be similar to above. Chemicaly, the DNA is one sugar, one phosphate, I just need the red (phosphate) to point outward instead of right…
I tried what you did, trying out dupliverts on a screwed helical edge, but the dupliverts are oriented wrongly, even after rotating the spheres or turning on the rot button for dupliverts. One color seems to insist on going to one side, instead of behaving as expected, with one color inside and another outside.
One workaround I found was to join the red and white spheres as a single mesh. In the front view, while tabbed in the edit mode, add a vertical edge between the spheres, with the height defining the spacing between the helix’s single turn. Then subdivide this edge and connect the middle vertex to the closest vertices of the two spheres, forming a sort of cross shaped edge connecting the two spheres. Move the entire mesh in the x distance off center. All these while still in the edit mode, then press the screw button. You may have to experiment with the distance from the center and number of copies per turn, but it seems to work ok… it results in one color sphere inside and another color outside stringed in a helical arrangement. Removing the extra edges created is another task, however. But they can easily be selected by Alt clicking on one edge to select the edge loops…
Hiya!
This might have been said, but I found that the easiest way was to use dupliframes. I just built two surface circles, and animated them to move in a spiral upwards. Then i just dupliframed them, made duplis real, joined all the circles in one of the spirals, then went into edit mode and hit ‘F’. voila, instant helix.
After that, I just built a cylinder and dupliframed it to the exact same animation, and i had a DNA strand.
Could you post a pic of your DNA?
Here is one of my test renders (DoF postpro)
