Figure Art

2014

The production process, broadly speaking, was:

• Receive molecule data, protein data, or similar reference from a textbook author or other subject matter expert

• Create, filter, organize, and clean-up any source data using scientific visualization software (e.g. pymol or Chimera, depending on the type of source data and ultimate style goals of the render), export the data in a standard 3D file format

• Load processed source data into Maya, run custom MEL/python scripts to prepare the models for rendering (e.g. assign materials automatically, close mesh holes, smooth normals, increase tessellation of surfaces, assign models to render layers for later compositing, etc.)

• After rendering, composite passes in Photoshop, then use Illustrator to apply line art and text label and prepare for print

In order to be illustrative, figures tend to emphasizes a simple and clean style, and adhere to established and approved and palettes for the textbook title or series as a whole.