Yukinori Inagaki - Cell Division


This page provides a technical breakdown of an animation of cells undergoing cell division (cytokinesis).

	Reference Image : This reference image is from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgLJrvoX_qo

	This is my final movie of cell division animation by MEL scripting.

Breakdown My script creats one or two cell surface from two spheres depending on time. Here is a breakdown of my sctipt.

This process is only for one frame. My cell division script creats cell surfaces for each frame. Visivility keyframes are automatically set, so each surface can be seen only in apptopriate frame.
Problem & Solution How to edit the curves is very important in my cell dicision script. I applied several equation to achieve good result. The left side graph shows relation between time and scale of the boundary curve. The right graphshows relation between the influence of scaling from boundary curve to other curves and the distance between the boundary curve and other curves.

First time, I used linear equation for a decay of influence as you can see on the graph, and I got this result. This is really bad because it completely lose volume preservation, and the shapes become like pears.

Finaly. I found witch of agnesi equation in Famous Curves Index, and applied it in my script. The result became much better!

Scripts
	This is original spheres' animation created by create_cell_spheres.mel. create_cell_spheres.mel

	This is a movie created from the above scene by cell_div_seq.mel. cell_div_seq.mel

	This is final result. To add organic movement, I wrote a script which creats a lattice defromer whose every lattice point has noise animation expressions. latticeNoise.mel

Conclusion
I am satisfied with my result. However, my script can provide only one cell division. After the division, there is no way to divide cells again with my script. If I could implement multiple division, it would be very nice.

Breakdown

Problem & Solution

Scripts

Conclusion