u/Br4mGunst

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I recently found the published FlyWire fly brain dataset and thought it would be really interesting to bring it into Houdini.

I imported the neuron skeletons as curves and combined them with the published annotation data, which gave me a lot of useful information to visualize.

From that data I could create different color visualizations based on actual brain information, like brain groups, Kenyon cells associated with learning & memory and the two sides of the brain.

I could probably make 1000 more renders of this, but here are my 3 favorites!

See the video and more renders on my Instagram:

https://u2l.ai/bramgunst-instagram

Data credit - FlyWire / Schlegel et al.:

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10877326

My jacuzzi simulation is finally finished!

I worked on this project in my free time for almost a year. The main focus was creating my own custom whitewater bubble solver.

The hardest part was getting realistic bubble emission, clumping and advection. I wanted the bubbles to move naturally through the water, collect into larger clusters and interact convincingly with the surface.

Another major challenge was making the solver work at different scales. The whitewater needed to remain consistent in extreme close-ups while still reading clearly in wider shots.

Around 20 million bubbles were simulated above and below the water.

The solver has now become robust enough that I can plug it into almost any fluid simulation and have it work out of the box.

The final scene was shaded and rendered in Blender 5.2 using Cycles and the new Thin-Walled feature. I was genuinely impressed by how well Blender handled such a large number of bubbles compared to other render engines I tested. The rendering speed in Cycles honestly blew my mind.

Sound by Eliot Desmet

Watch the high-resolution 4K version here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gscmFUfteY