Blender for Scientists - How to Make ANY Crystal in Blender

This is a follow up to my video on making molecules. Crystals are a little bit different and the tutorial reflects that.

Once again this tutorial makes use of the incredible (and free) program Avogadro, as well as Blender. In the future I may make a longer video dedicated to just Avogadro as it still has many promising features for working, especially working with proteins and DNA. It is a powerful scientific tool in its own right and a lot of the importing for visualizing in Blender is very straightforward.

The CGFigures Asset Library:
A compilation of most of what I've released/will release in one CC0 package:

[sbjuice]

Working on some graphics for an ACS journal - this stuff is a gold mine! Thanks so much!!!

[xkfm]

Your channel is pure treasure. I'm so happy that I found you today and subscribed. Keep up the good work! Thank you!

[tapabratadam]

Important time stams for revision
4:10 Activate atomic blender add-on
5:35 controlling bond shape with object data properties
8:15 Making atom instances real

[sudarshanreddyt]

you really helped me thanks a lot . i am so strugglled to get the exact atomic structure of silicon finally i did it. thank you. and dont stop this kind of educational videos

[ruxtic]

I love your tutorials so much! After finishing my master thesis I'll follow them one by one, they're amazing! Thank you for doing this!

[MRORANDY]

Thanks for very interesting tutorials. This is exactly what I was looking for 🙂

[ancient]

That is incurable .. many thanks for sharing

[jilier_shen]

Hello Joe! A lot of thanks for the useful content!

[manhxuanpham]

Thank you for your tutorial. It is easily understandable and extremely interesting. I am wondering how to add polyhedral in the crystal structures. Eg: make Sulphur tetragonal for Zn in this case. Thanks!

[ChefStache]

Wouldnt some of the issues with avogadro be avoided by using VESTA instead?

[lawrencedoliveiro]

0:14 It’s a standard package in the Debian repository, so those running Debian and derivatives can just install it from their package manager.

Hmm, it appears the Debian package does not include .cif support.

[MRF]

It's been two years since this video was released. But now with 3.4, you showed your TMD and graphene assets in one of your latest videos (B & S - ep 3) which showed far greater semi-auto tunability than this one or your LiCoO video. So could you please make another tut of this video (using TMD) showing your latest workflow with such tunability? It'd be really helpful! Thanks!

[zhujunhuang]

This is amazing! I am just wondering if it is possible to bend these crystal structures?

[coreys]

Great subject as usual.
Any idea how to make a snail shell or nautilus shell?
I've tried in the past, but I've been trying the wrong stuff.

[lawrencedoliveiro]

2:44 How about changing the view projection from Perspective to Orthographic.

[yalldonny]

Thank you for this awesome video. I have a question, I want to use draw the polygons in my crystal cif file. However, each time I import the file into blender, it becomes the ball and stick, do you know how I can turn them to the polygon in the original file in avogadro？ Thank you！

[vikasjangra]

Can you please tell of how could I change the colour of a particular atom only and not all together? Thanks.

[LP-lnoe]

Question, what are the specs of the pc you are workin on? I am mostly curious about RAM capacity and processor speed. I wanna try this but i am scared of any 3D projects, i dont want my laptop to crash XD

[ancient]

If I choose say the same setting for a molecule rather than a crystal, would I get similar results? Another question: How can I convert a measured crystal into a PDB file? I tried to open my CIf file with Avogadro but it failed! Many thanks in advance.

[joesam]

Hi, when i try to render, everything changes to green. What might be the issue.