Burning Question: How can I create medical animations?

It’s worth mentioning that you these tutorials and tools are also useful for medical themed entertainment. For example, use them in a film about a viral outbreak when your character is looking through a microscope. Or perhaps you need to show some alien DNA in a lab. Or maybe you are creating art for a medical drama. Lots of possibilities!

How to become a Medical Illustrator and Animator

Below, Annie Campbell explains how to become a medical illustrator.

In the interview below, Emily McDougall talks about getting into the Medical Illustration and Animation field.

Medical videos are used to educate patients, train doctors, and sell pharmaceuticals. And, there are lots of tools out there that can be used to create and animate everything from cells and viruses to the different systems of the body.

Here, we’ll show a few cool examples, and give you some tutorials on dividing cells, blood flow, and more. In addition, download some free models, or purchase some tools to create your own medical animations.

Medical Animation Examples

COVID-19 Animation: What Happens If You Get Coronavirus?

This video hit the web just as Coronavirus hit the world.

OneDown: Make Cancer the Victim

Cancer is a scary thing. Believe me. I went through it in 2019-2020. This video for OHSU Knight Cancer Institute explains the leaps and bounds that have been made in the research and treatment of chronic myeloid leukemia. Directed by Robert Sethi with Animation from The Mill, the 3D was created in Cinema 4D with effects and compositing in After Effects and Nuke. 

There’s an article on The Mill website about the animation. 

Instead of individually sculpting each cell we used a set of noise and rules to randomly generate them, giving us a lot more freedom. And the comp team, led by Martin Karlsson, did a really excellent job. They took our renders and really pushed the electro-microscope effect to the maximum.

Ashraf Ghoniem, 3D lead artist, The Mill

Geometric Medical Animation Showreel 2020

Geometric Medical Animation shows their fine work.

Medical Animation – Vessel Studios

Watch Vessel Studios’ beautiful reel of medical animations and microscopic elements.

3D Medical Animation Demo Reel – John Liebler

John Liebler says, “A collection of my 3D medical animations, including “The Inner Life of the Cell”, “Powering the Cell: Mitochondria”, “Biology: How Life Works”, and other more recent work.”  His website, which is at the bottom of the video, is artofthecell.com. John created this beautiful work in Lightwave and After Effects, and I’m guessing that these are scientifically accurate.

Medical Animations Tutorials

Below, check out several tutorials on creating cells, DNA, and more. The tutorials are for Cinema 4D, ZBrush, X-Particles, Maya, and After Effects.

Veronica Falconieri Hays | Maxon NAB 2020 Rewind

Veronica Falconieri Hays is a Certified Medical Illustrator. She shows you how to create a nanoscale cellular landscape in Maxon Cinema 4D. In addition, she explains how she modeled DNA and cellular structures with dynamics, splines, and sweeps.

ZBrushLIVE Industry Spotlight: Medical Illustration – Andrew Swift – ZBrush 2022

The webinar below aired on 26 July 2022 with Andrew Swift from SO-form and the ZBrush Team. Andrew showcased how he uses ZBrush within his medical illustration pipeline, and it’s riveting!

Athanasios “Noseman” Pozantzis: Organic Shape Morphing Inside Cinema 4D

Learn how to create a medical-style motion graphics animation in this NAB 2017 presentation by Athanasios Pozantzis. This was featured in our MAXON NAB 2017 Rewind – Volume 8: Character, Organic, Procedural Modeling with the video from Cineversity.