Dear all, Re: Henry's last e-mail about 3DMoleculardesign.com Similar images to those can be generated directly from pdb format using free software: MOLPOV (turns PDB files into POV files) http://www.chem.ufl.edu/~der/der_pov2.htm and POVRay (a ray tracing program www.povray.org ) which reads the POV file above and renders it as an image. MOLPOV runs directly using the default settings (although the structures are a little ugly in my humble opinion) to output the POV file. POVRay takes a little bit of learning - but probably only about 30 minutes if you just want to render a pre-generated file - you can then choose the image size (resolution), output format etc (I've readily generated bitmap images about 10k by 10k pixels using a Pentium IV laptop). With a little bit of thought, you can also prepare some rather attractive animated movies using simple 'clock' variables within POVRay - but unfortunately it doesn't know chemistry, so making the molecules do more than move around (rotate, translate etc) is difficult without getting unrealistic motion (The trick to this is probably to avoid the clock variable and generate a PDB file for each 'frame' using some appropriate chemistry package - then generate multiple POV files - then render them all. This is something I would love to develop further if anyone is interested in helping - I'm just a happy amateur!) Cheers, Craig At 16:21 03/03/2004, Rzepa, Henry wrote:
A colleague has pointed out the following site to me
http://www.3dmoleculardesigns.com/
who do custom "3D" printing from molecular PDF format coordinates. I have seen these, and they are done in full colour (oxygen=red, blue etc etc)
Certainly a fascinating novelty (if a bit fragile, and the size is only about 10 cm across).
--
Henry Rzepa. +44 (020) 7594 5774 (Voice); +44 (0870) 132 3747 (eFax) http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/ Dept. Chemistry, Imperial College London, SW7 2AZ, UK.
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******************** Dr Craig Butts Department of Chemistry Exeter University EX4 4QD United Kingdom Ph: +44 1392 263455 Fax +44 1392 263434