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Microscopy in Blender

Microscopy Nodes is a Blender add-on that incorporates bioimage support for the open-source software blender. Microscopy Nodes simplifies loading bioimage (tif/zarr) files as volumetric objects in Blender.

Please make some pretty figures with this add-on!

For usage questions please use the image.sc forum 😁 For issues/bug reports/feature requests please open an issue.

If you publish with this add-on, please cite the preprint: 

@article {Gros2025.01.09.632153,
    author = {Gros, Oane and Bhickta, Chandni and Lokaj, Granita and Schwab, Yannick and K{\"o}hler, Simone and Banterle, Niccol{\`o}},
    title = {Microscopy Nodes: versatile 3D microscopy visualization with Blender},
    elocation-id = {2025.01.09.632153},
    year = {2025},
    doi = {10.1101/2025.01.09.632153},
    publisher = {Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory},
    URL = {https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2025/01/14/2025.01.09.632153},
    eprint = {https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2025/01/14/2025.01.09.632153.full.pdf},
    journal = {bioRxiv}
}

Current Features

Microscopy Nodes supports:

  • up to 5D (tzcyx in any axis order) tifs and OME-Zarr files can be loaded.
  • Channel interface to define how to load data
  • Replacing a pyramidal dataset with it's higher resolution version
  • Accurate scale bars and boxes
  • Loading of per-index label masks
  • Lazy loading of giant files (no data is loaded in RAM outside what's rendered)

Get Started!

All icons used except the Microscopy Nodes icon were designed for Blender by @jenzdrich under CC-BY-SA 4.0