Hello, I need some advice on whether or not I can use
Blender for my application.
I think my application is rather simple. I need to develop
simple animation similar to the animation shown in
this youtube video:
Basically, I would like to develop animation, which shows
DNA (represented by spheres) flowing through a nanopore (a tube
represented by atoms, which will be spheres of different sizes)
from two external text files:
-
One file that will contain x,y, z coordinates of a
nanopore (these coordinates will not change). Just think of
a nanopore as being a “tube” represented by a collection
of atoms. The data will have 4 columns: x, y, and z
coordinate information as well as a type column. The
type column defines what kind of atom is being plotted (the type
parameter will determine what size and color the sphere is that
represents the atom). I would like to read in this data only once,
but plot it throughout the entire animation. -
One file that will contain x, y, z coordinates of the
DNA positions as a function of time. So, this data will also have
4 columns, x, y, and z data as well as a fourth column, which
will be time.
So, what I would like to do is read in coordinates from the
nanopore file (file number 1 above) and plot a sphere for each
atom in the nanopore, with the size and color of the sphere
dependent upon what type of atom is being plotted.
Then, to create the movie, I would like to plot the DNA from the
DNA coordinate file as a function of time, showing the DNA flowing
through the tube. Again, plotting an sphere to represent the DNA.
The physics computational engine has already been build in Fortran,
I just need to build a visualization tool to view my results.
My question is, can I use Blender and Python to create this application?
Are there any tutorials that focus on this type of application?
Thanks in advance for your time and assistance!