Professional animation tools like Mental Ray and various Autodesk products have been slowly making inroads into classic scientific visualization areas for the last several years, mostly due to their ability to add subtle realism details like refraction and diffuse light effects to renderings in ways not typically supported by scientific packages. Autodesk took a trip to the IGEM event, the International Genetically Engineered Machine event, and saw how Maya is being used in their work.
You may be asking yourselves why a scientific competition merits mention in a blog dedicated towards Maya, or even whether my coworkers stumbled into the wrong event. Our Research team has been driving a number of initiatives to study how Maya can benefit the synthetic biology and nanotechnology industries through collaboration with academic institutions and researchers. Maya is being used within the life and material sciences to create stunning visual simulations of molecular structures and behaviors.
