LifeBrush

A toolkit for painting agent-based mesoscale molecular simulations and illustrations.

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What it is

A toolkit for painting agent-based mesoscale molecular simulations and illustrations.

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Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

I love Goodsell’s paintings too: they make the molecular world feel simultaneously beautiful, crowded, wonderfully strange, and colorfully tasty. This reminded me of Tim…

DonHopkins used a recommendation phrase. One indexed comment matches. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.

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This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 1:49:46 PM UTC.

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Mentions over time

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Observed mentions: 2020-03-30 02:15:08 UTC to 2026-10-13 12:44:48 UTC.

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Period	Start (UTC)	End (exclusive, UTC)	Mentions	Comments
2020	2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1
2021	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
2022	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
2023	2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
2024	2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
2025	2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
2026 (partial)	2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1

What Hacker News says

2 sources

DonHopkins·Oct 13, 2026Recommendation phrase

I love Goodsell’s paintings too: they make the molecular world feel simultaneously beautiful, crowded, wonderfully strange, and colorfully tasty. This reminded me of Tim Davison’s LifeBrush, an interactive VR painting and simulation system explicitly inspired by Goodsell’s illustrations. In his thesis, Davison describes using it to "structurally recreate, simulate and step inside" famous Goodsell illustrations -- the cytoskeleton demo is a striking example of a painting becoming a world you can enter and set in motion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CsxADBpal0 https://hdl.handle.net/1880/111493 I first called LifeBrush "Emacs for Cytoplasm" in a Boids thread and asked Davison whether the molecular motion was slowed down. He replied that medium-sized proteins move around 5 m/s, and that LifeBrush deliberately slows and smooths Brownian m

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otion for illustration. The code was open source; at the time it required a VR headset and had a clunky, research-grade interface. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22715199 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22724602 https://github.com/timdecode/LifeBrush The interaction is the magic: in the overview, a ribosome moves along mRNA as tRNA brings amino acids and a polypeptide chain grows. You can grab the ribosome and move it where you want, rather than wait for Brownian motion. I described it as dragging the ribosome’s "lazy ass" through "tRNA pasta and mRNA meatballs." It’s a scientific illustration you can play with, not a literal molecular-dynamics visualization. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LBHRyGxLGI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=624F5iaCKco https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L482dpH9S8o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUnTEI9QZPE Davison’s work has since grown into CellWalk, a guided, interactive tour through a bacterial cell, from the whole cell down to its atoms, for iPhone, iPad, and Apple Vision Pro. And here the Goodsell connection is even more direct: Davison’s site credits David Goodsell, Ludovic Autin, and Martina Maritan with the CellWalk model and tour, based on their whole-cell paper. Davison is now CEO and cofounder of Ako Biotica, the company behind CellWalk. https://timd.ca/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8DOAPPjMw0 https://cellwalk.ca/ https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jmb.2021.167351 LifeBrush papers: the 2018 conference paper, followed by the 2019 Computers & Graphics article on painting, simulating, and visualizing dense biomolecular environments. https://doi.org/10.1109/CW.2018.00017 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cag.2019.05.006

In The baffling intelligence of a single cell (2024)

timtimmy·Mar 30, 2020

You are right, they move insanely fast. The average speed of a medium-sized protein is about 5 m/s. Inside an E. coli, any two proteins will encounter each other at least once a second [0] (this book is incredible). My simulation is inaccurate in terms of Brownian motion. It is slowed down and smoothed for illustrative purposes. It should be more violent. Nice idea with blurring, I'll think about that. The code is on GitHub. It requires a VR headset, and it is frankly a little clunky and "research code" in terms of the UI. But check it out :D [1]. The next version will support larger simulations on the GPU and a more friendly UI. I have friends at the Scripps institute who work on similar stuff, check them out [2]. [0]: David Goodsell (2009) The Machinery of Life https://www.amazon.ca/Machinery-Life-David-S-Goodsell/dp/038... [1]: https:/

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/github.com/timdecode/LifeBrush [2]: https://ccsb.scripps.edu/cellpaint/

In Boids