Alzheimer's Enigma

[@STROBdotNET]

it's amazing what you can do with Blender. For a free software you get a infinite quality/price ratio!

[@DavidZoll17]

Those neuron and protein recycling animations were done with Blender? Good job! Good information too ☺

[@lesporches]

David Zoll Yes, all the animation was made using Blender.

[@johnliebler]

This is fantastic work! I worked on an Alzheimer's piece for a Pharma client this summer, and I wish it looked this good. :)

[@JohnFerrier]

Still one of the best scientific Blender videos around.

[@paulwilliamd1467]

Not only excellent graphics but speaker was clear and kept with the action. A transcript would be useful so you do not have to replay the video.

[@lesporches]

Thank you very much. A transcript is available, check the link in the description.

[@cpfanc4216]

Thanks for the great video, Very clear! Nice work

[@cilounette1]

Thanks for the great work, I've seen quite a few specially french ones, but this is a great complement. Very clear too!

[@BoogieDownProduction]

What a beautiful animation. I think this is the future of "textbooks". Could have a button that you press and a hologram shows the mechanism. Would be very helpful in basically all of the sciences. Reading long winded descriptions of mechanisms is a very inefficient way of doing it IMO. Has anyone looked at the cannabis research regarding alzheimers? Pretty interesting stuff

[@lesporches]

Digital text books with animations and interactive content are indeed already happening, check out E.O. Wilson's Life on Earth: eowilsonfoundation.org/e-o-wilson-s-life-on-earth/ And thanks for watching the video.

[@BoogieDownProduction]

Wow you just blew my mind. Even from the covers I can tell those books are probably really interesting. The internet as we see it today is what my generation has. I wonder if this is the next big thing for the next generation?

[@BoogieDownProduction]

IThinkWithMy Liver I can see where its helpful at times in research especially for long papers. But in general IMO video is superior for most cases. But I disagree with your claim that we must read boring mechanisms in order to understand them. I am sure I am not alone (just look at all the content here on youtube), I will usually read about a mechanism but youtube will always be my next step. Most times I find animations to be much more efficient for learning. In most cases video is faster and clearer. I have a feeling you will find that to be more common younger people.

[@BoogieDownProduction]

IThinkWithMy Liver Everyone does not learn the same way. You dont know what I have or havent learned so thats kind of a foolish thing to say. I find videos are more helpful than textbooks and know many other classmates who feel the same way. Your opinion of whether videos are helpful or not, is just that your opinion. Maybe videos arent helpful for you? Thats fine but not everyone is like you.

[@hanniballecter9592]

The narration sounds a bit like Julian Assange. Excellent animation. I don't know how long something like this takes to put together, but please make more for different diseases if possible. This is one of the few animations I've seen which appears highly realistic. Well done.

[@lesporches]

Thank you for watching. It does take some time to put together, this video was a 6 month project (which includes literature review, consultation with researchers and lots of animation work). I certainly did try to make the video look realistic.

[@JohnFerrier]

+Chris Hammang You should make a tutorial on your techniques. This is an awesome animation.

[@ToniOliverH]

Great job. Thanks a lot.

[@SjonSjine]

Maybe some short tutorials how you dit it? Great work!

[@blindfire4ever]

Awesome video. Do you have any citations for the blood testing? I want to see the research! I'm going to use this in my Alzheimer's Class

[@lesporches]

Indeed, here is the paper with the CSIRO protein based blood biomarker for Alzheimer's: archneur.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=1217314 There are also tests which look at blood fats www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24608097 and I believe there are others which look at nucleic acids in the blood. Here are some nice reviews for the current state of blood tests for Alzheimer's: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23850333 and www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24365657

[@blindfire4ever]

Awesomeness thanks can you add that to video description? Keep up the great work. My students will eat this up! I know I am.

[@ScientiaViz]

Wonderful work here, Chris! Can you tell me a bit about the rendering in Blender for the lipid bilayer shots? I'm impressed that Blender is capable of producing renders of this quality. Were SSS and GI used? How long did the frames take to render, on average?

[@lesporches]

Hello, Thanks for the question. All the rendering was done in Blender using the cycles render engine. I used translucent shaders instead of sub surface scattering (SSS). While SSS looks better and more realistic, the translucent shader can help reduce render times in my experience. I often mix a translucent shader with diffuse and glossy as well. Also, most of the scenes have motion blue enabled, except where it simply became too slow to render. Most frames of the animation took between 2 and 20 minutes to render. Some of the scenes have 100s of thousands of instances, which has some influence on the render times. The actual instanced objects are actually moderately low poly (20000 or so), which is one way to try and speed things up. Having multiple instances of objects with 100,000 surfaces can start to make things slower. Most of the rendering was done on a gtx 780 using CUDA. A good way to speed up renders is to reduce the number of bounces down to a maximum of 4 or so, which still preserves most of the realism, but I think can save a few cycles. Hope this helps.

[@vyshnavimahendran6083]

how did you make these 3D animations, what program did you use?

[@lesporches]

+Vyshnavi Mahendran The animation was made using Blender and the Adobe creative suite primarily. The visual elements are based heavily on research into alzheimers, and uses the protein data bank for protein structure representations.

[@micheleg.sullivan5643]

Awesome amazing animation-but there are no blood tests that can accurately predict AD before symptoms occur. In fact there are no reliable blood biomarkers of AD at all at this point, although the search is on for them. The only useful biomarkers now are found in cerebrospinal fluid and their predictive and diagnostic value is at present limited to research studies.

[@westfield90]

Unfortunately the more we discover the more we realize how little we know. Even after 60 years since we declared war on cancer we still use chemo and the equally destructive radiation as the main therapy. We just cannot seem to get that breakthrough.

Great video! Nice job! (Y)

[@criticalacclaim3800]

Great visualisations, terrible narration. It was slow, monotonous and uninspiring. Check out CrashCourse if you want to know how to keep people engaged with your video.