How to Make Phospholipid Bilayers and Cells in Blender 2.8 

I agree! One of the best tutorials I have seen!

Hi Laura, welcome to the Blender community! You could definitely insert proteins directly into the membrane or inside the envelop. How easy or hard that is depends on how you want to make the protein. If the protein is one big model then it's fairly simple, if it's a whole collection of models (say for each atom) it would be a bit more challenging (but still doable). I've been meaning to do a followup to this tutorial for awhile so this sounds like a good opportunity.

@@CGFigures thank you so much, I will keep "playing" with it and I will definitely follow your tutorials!

This specific goal is something we've discussed a decent bit on the blender[dot]science discord. I've seen beautiful versions of the effect in Houdini and I believe there are some working versions in Blender that use simulation nodes. I don't know if I've seen any tutorials for it yet though.

@@CGFigures Thank you very much for your response, I really appreciate it! Much respect to you and all that you've done to help others. I've learned so much from your content!

This is a bit of an older tutorial if I remember correctly so I'm not sure it will work with Blender 3.6. For a more current approach I would check out the asset library I recently released. (ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-4TC1WjKiMwQ.html)

Hi Timothy, glad you enjoyed it. This video is a bit older and the effect here was definitely done using a boolean with the particle systems. I believe there is another video on the channel that describes the setup. These days I would recommend using geometry nodes because the effect is a lot cleaner. My most recent video on cell-builder describes it in part and so does Brady Johnston's most recent video.

@@CGFigures Thanks, I'll take a look!

Hi Vishal. If I understand correctly then this is a problem with Blender not exporting the particles. There is a solution but it's a bit messy and high poly. You'd have to use the convert option in the particle system. This will make each phospholipid its own object. You then need to unlink all of them (discourse.threejs.org/t/what-is-the-right-way-to-export-particles-in-gltf-from-blender/14385). If you do that you should be able to include all of them in your glb but based on how the particles were made in this tutorial I think that might not be the best idea. If you're planning to animate them you might be better off doing it in Blender and then exporting the video. Less flexible, but more likely not to crash Blender with millions of verts.

@@CGFigures Hello Joe! Thanks for the solution, As per the steps given the .glb model I exported worked very well in the powerpoint

My best advice is to check out one of Brady Johnston's tutorials or one of my more recent tutorials for making these types of structures using geometry nodes. Physics can be a bit tricky sometimes and I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to achieve. It sounds like you want to put proteins in and have them interact with the membrane through the physics. For that every particle would have to be made into a piece of geometry with its own physics. That's very computationally intensive and the geonodes approaches will probably work better.

I found a way to do it by flipping the face by selecting all vertices in wireframe mode and pressing alt + n

This is usually a problem with the rotation of the phospholipid being scattered. If you apply the rotation with Ctrl+A then you can usually play around to get everything to align properly though this tutorial does use a bit of an older method and these days I would recommend trying to use geometry nodes instead.

@@CGFigures Like in your GSscatter tutorial ? I will try, thank you for response

This is a big on-going topic in our discord. I don't think we have a flexible solution yet but it's definitely something people are working on

I made a prototype "cell builder" node in 2.93 and I've been told it works well. I'll definitely be doing a refresh on several tutorials with the new geonodes system though. Hopefully wrapping up the basics tutorial this weekend.

Hi Laura. I actually have a number of models including phospholipids, glassware, and some common molecules. They're available on gumroad or blendswap if you search for CGFigures.

@@CGFigures yeah, I was able to download your assets. Very helpful. I was looking for a phispholipid model model showing each and every molecule in the structure. Thanks for all the great videos and freebies

Hey Pablo. Thank you. This specific model isn't available for download but I do have a more recent video on "cell builder" (ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-_PBJgrqDIQM.html) which provides a tool for making these very quickly

@@CGFigures Thank you! Your recommendation has helped me a lot. I love the work that you guys do. Greetings

I might be mistaken but this sounds like the displacement modifier strength is maybe too high. Try lowering the strength a bit