Interactive Bioprinter Visualization

// OVERVIEW SUMMARY

This is the result of a school group project during a class in "Agile working methods" spanning over 5 weeks. The task was to pick a customer from a list and solve their problem and request. We decided to go with a company operating in the medtech industry who wanted to make their product easier to understand. Our initial idea was to create an Unreal Engine 5 application but after some thought and planning we decided to aim for a more lightweight web solution. Considering it wasn't going to be real-time visualization anyways and we could save quite some resources and make it more portable.

The end product is a web page consisting of simple navigation through a tour of a bioprinter with rendered clips from Blender. This allows the user to start the tour, read the callout texts in a intuitive, seamless and simple way at their own pace. It sort of works like a powerful powerpoint presentation in the browser. 

In this project I mainly tackled the visual direction and other technical responsibilities such as:
・ Concept design
・ Style guide
・ Scene creation
・ Camera and lighting animation
・ Motion design/graphics (callout text created in After Effects)
・ Some materials and model tweaking (display, hinges, glass and heart valve)
・ Final Renders

One of the challenges I faced was working with multiple Blender projects and files and stitching them all together. Every group member had different tasks in which I was responsible to merge them all together in the final Blender scene. I mainly solved this by having modularity in mind when setting up the scene and its animations. Once we had solved the dimensions and placement of the bioprinter model, I worked with proxies and empties to set up all the different scene animations. Points of interests, focal length and camera constraints are all controlled by empties, allowing me to easier go back and make changes and replacing potential models.
I also created my own widget in After Effects to effortlessly add the different animated callout texts which helped me speed things up in the post process stage.

// RESULT RETROSPECTIVE

Overall I'm happy with what we achieved in time. We had a fully working website demonstrating the product. In hindsight I would've preferred having a more structured and streamlined workflow with clear roles during the process. We also had plans on adding more examples of use cases which I think would've helped to give further understanding of the product.

View the demo here (leave username blank and enter password "demo"):
https://bioprinter.andreaslarsson.dev

// GALLERY SCREENSHOTS