rendering a waving cilia

DaveC426913

I wish to create a sequence of 2D still frames of a waving cilium in a confined space.

I know there's software out there that can do it. I don't know if there's anything free. Or if anyone would be willing to render it for me. It's pretty simple.

CaptainQuasar

I would just grab a drawing of a sine wave and nudge it to the right one pixel for each frame of the animation. Paint.NET is a great graphics package that would be easy to create the frames in as flat images (though really, you could even do this pretty easily in Microsoft Paint which comes with Windows if that's what you're using), then VirtualDub is an awesome little video editing package that I believe will let you import each image in the sequence as a video frame. (Both free.)

DaveC426913

Sorry, I haven't been clear. I'm a pretty good artist and do a mean PhotoShop and even studied animation in college, so if it could be done by hand, I'm the one to do it.

But it's not enough...

Aw heck, I can't even begin to describe it... Find a thousand words-worth attached.

The flow in my sketches isn't smooth enough. I'm having to balance several elements such as the consistent curvature of the cilium and the volume of fluid it contains with the constraints of the walls.

Attached Thumbnails

   

CaptainQuasar

Your attachments haven't come through yet. But reading between the lines, are you saying you want to generate this from a 3D raytraced model, maybe? If so, POV-Ray is a popular free tool for that. Between that and VirtualDub you could put together an animation.

DaveC426913

No, 2D simple is fine. In fact, all I need is the shape; I could polish it from there.

I'll see if I can bump the approval for the images.

CaptainQuasar

Oh, I see. You need it to sort of slither around inside the confined space? Yeah, I would think that the tough thing is to simulate the tension and the constraint on the maximum curvature.

I'm entirely amateur at doing this stuff on the cheap so I'm not familiar with the professional tools that might do this. If you can retouch the images I'd almost say get a camcorder and “rent” a snake from a pet shop and build a scale model. Then you'd get to sincerely add “no animals were harmed in the making of this animation” in the credits.

hypnagogue

If you think you can model the dynamics mathematically, and if you have access to Matlab, then you could draw the frames for the basic animation using psychtoolbox and copy them to images on disk for further editing.