Hello everyone! I am a product designer with experience in rendering and animating products in keyshot and other software used in industrial design. As a blender beginner I am now planning to do medical animations of stent implantations like it is shown in this beautiful project on behance:
I’m very happy to see that there are so many good tutorials on almost every function of blender. Nevertheless it is hard to get an idea of where to start. Modeling, textures and setting a render environment is something I can learn by following tutorials on Youtube since I have basic knowledge of it from other software.
My main concern is the animation of the stent structure. Simple deformations by adding the curve modifier should be possible for me. But I have no clue how to animate the expansion of the stent in a realistic way. I already tried to simply scale the OBJ file of the stent in one axis but obiously the struts would also scale and remain way too big in the expanded state. Is there a way to deform the stent in a physically correct way?
Does anyone have experience in animating stent structures in blender? Any help on this topic is higly appreciated.
Thank you!
stent.blend (1.4 MB)
Not sure how that would look like. But maybe like i my file. Just create a surface that resembles the shape of the stent. make a shapekey and move vertices to resemble the expanded shape.Use proportional editing(smoother). Use a surface deform on the stent and choose the simple surface with shapekeys. You can make several shapekeys and animate them to fit the stages of the desired animation. Make sure the stent geometry has enough subdivisions to deform with the surface.
@Beautifool_Hueman Thank you very much for your reply. I tested your workflow right away but it keeps transforming the stent struts in a not physically correct way.
In this screenshot you see that the upper struts are thicker than the struts of the bottom of the stent. In reality it should be the other way round because the expanded struts would constrict. It gets even more clear what I mean when I try to crush the stent:
So what I am trying to achieve is a deformation where the structs behave like they would do in reality. I think for visualisation purpose it would also be fine if the strut thickness would just stay the same in every state of expansion or contraction.
maybe like this ? But more vertices on edges. My scene is a bit janky
stent.blend (1.1 MB). You could also animate the thickness, or change it depending on some factor.
Better, but not perfect.
stentBetter.blend (1.8 MB)
Yes, this is exactly what I was looking for!
I would change the profile curve to a rectangle so that it looks more like a laser cut stent than a stent out of wire.
But I guess the key is converting the input geometry to curves like you did in your file. It seems like curves are easier to handle in blender for that purpose.
The only problem left is that I was not able to convert this mesh into a curve:
stent.blend (2.1 MB)
Is there a simple way to convert a mesh like this into a curve? Since I am a beginner I don’t know that much blender tools … If there is no fast way it would also be okay for me to rebuild the stent structure as a curve and work with that.
Thanks in advance!
I am not so good with geometry nodes. Got like half a solution. Maybe someone here knows how to do it ? The problem is the curvetilt seems not to be uniform. Its right at the top and 90 degrees at the bottom. My idea was to use sample nearest surface and align the tilt of the curve to the underlying normal. I don’t know how to do that.
I can’t think of a way to convert your geometry to a simple curve.
stentBetter (2).blend (1.8 MB)
Oh, i just saw that the tilt is influenced by the shapekey ? I wonder why
Looks promising!
But I am looking for a way to visualize a lot of different types of stent structures in the future and for that it would be the simpliest way to convert the imported stent strucutres into curves. Building every single stent design in geometry nodes seems like a lot of work.
If there is no way to convert the imported mesh into a curve it would probably still be easier to rebuild the stent design as a curve and then work with that.
Does anyone here know if it is possible to convert a stent like this into a simple curve in blender?
