DNA and Molecules- From Gene Coding to Lighting and Rendering

Some abstract DNA and molecule renders. You may have read the title, you may be wondering: "How on Earth does one get into gene coding?". Well... One late summer night, with a moderate breeze shaking the potted plants on the window sill, one crazy 3D artist named Sylvie starts wondering... How are sheep cloned? How are genes edited? How are new molecules designed? What software do chemistry and med students use? How could one edit ones own genes to produce web like a spider and shoot it out of their fingertips? Well that night I didn't figure out how to become Spider-Woman but I did manage to produce some cool art, because some pondering and some googling later, AHA! They use software such as the University of California San Francisco's ChimeraX and the so so incredible Avogadro (No not avacado, Avogadro!). A few gigabytes of downloading later... and I was learning how to code my own genes, build my own molecules. A bit of tinkering and merging of thousands of auto-generated meshes and materials later (with the help of a bit of black magic and python scripting), I had some models in Blender that were ready for some shader, lighting, camera, and compositing work and tadaa! My custom genes and molecules were now being bought to life in glorious 4k! This shows that keeping software open source and accessible has implications beyond the intended software's applications, these powerful science and research tools can be used for art too! I am definitely not done with this software and I am always on the look out for new software from random, unrelated fields that I can use to satisfy my artistic addiction, so stay tuned for more trippy molecules, DNA, and whatever other sorcery I choose to get up to ;)