A Blender recreation and animation of a dual-mode optical microscope that combines:
- SPIM — Selective Plane Illumination Microscopy (light-sheet): a cylindrical lens shapes a laser into a thin sheet that illuminates one optical slice at a time, so the rest of a living sample stays dark and alive.
- FF-OCT — Full-Field Optical Coherence Tomography: a low-coherence source split into sample and reference arms; only the depth where the two path lengths match within the coherence length interferes, so moving the reference mirror selects a new layer.
The animation assembles the full optical train, builds both beam paths, then reveals the in-chamber optical sectioning and the two detection modes (fluorescence → molecules, interference → structure).
| File | What it is |
|---|---|
spim_ffoct_dual_mode.blend |
The full project: optics, animated beams, cameras, labels |
render_dark.py |
Headless render recipe for the dark "Nature-style" look (black world + floor, text stripped, 1080p) |
preview.png |
Title still |
Blender 5.1.2, Cycles / OptiX. For the dark look used in the final film:
blender -b spim_ffoct_dual_mode.blend -P render_dark.py -- full
(Omit -- full / pass -- spot to render a few check frames instead of all 1848.)
- Original scene design and optical layout — Chasing Light-Ray (@ChasingLight-Ray)
- Optical Component Pack V1 + Gaussian Beam Shader — Ryo Mizuta Graphics (@ryomizutagraphics). The optical component meshes in this file are from that pack and remain the property of Ryo Mizuta Graphics; they are included here with attribution.
- Recreation, assembly animation, in-chamber optical sectioning, and dual-mode detection — Yong Hu · MIT QPAI · built with Claude + Blender.
If you are the rights holder for any included asset and would prefer it not be distributed here, please open an issue and it will be removed.