When producing Mechanism of Action videos or any other medical animation that discusses molecular biology, it’s inevitable that we have to represent lipid bilayers at some point. The problem is that in reality they’re a densely packed collection of particles, and simulating that for a standard animation is computationally unfeasible (read: it will melt your computer). Cinema 4D has a fantastic set of noises that are great for all kinds of uses, but one in particular is useful for both lipid bilayers and expansive beds of cells: voronoi. The problem is that voronoi has a linear gradient, which creates cone-shapes when using it as a displacement map.

This tutorial shows how to get the perfect rounded profile on your voronoi displacement within the Redshift shader network. (TLDR: double your gamma with a color correction node!).