The Animal Cell

A stylised 3D model of an animal cell, built to be handled rather than read. Drag to orbit, scroll to zoom, click any organelle to isolate it and read what it does.

The textbook version of this is a labelled cross-section, which tells you where things sit but not how crowded it is in there. Rendering it in three dimensions makes the crowding the point: the mitochondria drift, the membrane is translucent enough to see through but solid enough to read as a boundary, and nothing is to scale because being to scale would make most of it invisible.

The demo film below was rendered from the model itself rather than screen-captured — a scripted camera path, every frame drawn deterministically at 1/60s intervals, so it loops exactly.