[extropy-chat] visualizing nanoscale

[Alejandro Dubrovsky]

On Sat, 2003-11-22 at 06:46, Eugen Leitl wrote:

> A suggestion was to roll your own. A couple of days ago
> I came upon this nice semilog-step flash visualization:
> 
> 	http://cellsalive.com/howbig.htm
> 
> I stole it, and attempted to add a couple of steps, to
> bring it down to the nanoscale. After two hours (and
> lots of growling) I got this:
> 
> 	http://moleculardevices.org/howbig.htm

nice.

> This was done on somewhat vintage hardware (Mac G4, 1.5 GByte RAM,
> oldish OpenGL accelerator). I'll try this again this weekend
> on a more recent (but: not bleeding edge system). VMD and PyMOL
> were both being able to handle the image size. I haven't tried
> Jmol, but have a suspicion it might be up to the task. The weak
> point was, surprisingly, Povray. The raytracer could barely
> render a 132 MByte .pov file with 1.5 GBytes RAM. Perhaps somebody
> here can suggest a better deal? Tachyon? Something else?
> 
You could give Blender a try.  I haven't used it for rendering purposes,
only as a modeller (and never seriously), and it doesn't import POVRay
files (AFAIK), but it does have decent python bindings so it might not
be too hard to import the data, and it seems to be the most popular GPL
modeller going around in case you want to do any other sort of 3d
playing.  You could also have a look at renderman compatible renderers
(never used, but Aqsis looks good enough.  There seem to be many
around.  Blender can export to Renderman too).  There is really no need
for ray-tracing.  Spheres look like spheres, and radiosity/lightning
will make them look like so, but the reflection off the always metalicy
floor just looks dated more than anything else.  And of course, you get
a huge speedup bonus.

alejandro