Egon & Peter,
(Peter, some of this is addressed more to Egon than to you. But I took the
liberty to address it to you because I would appreciate your response.)
While I was traveling last week I had the opportunity to spend a lot of
time thinking about 3d rendering in Jmol.
My thoughts in random order:
- It is ridiculous to require Java3D.
* It severely limits the user-base.
* I'm not a member of the "graphics community", but it doesn't
seem to me that it has very much momentum.
- We need a solution that supports 3D as an
applet with an old browser JVM.
- I worked out most of the design for a z-buffer scheme that
(I believe) would work quite well for molecular viewing.
- I also worked out a more complicated scheme which would offer
significantly better performance
* rendering times would be cut by 25%-50%
* at a cost of significantly more complex code
- performance is still going to be significantly slower than the
(rather tight) C code of RasMol ...
my wild guess is 5 times slower.
- I took a look at the OpenRasmol 2.7.1 code and uncovered one
rendering performance *issue* with cylindrical bonds.
That will be an area where Jmol could "catch up" a bit.
- Efficient 3D implementation of the following important
shapes is rather straightforward
* shaded spheres (aka Atoms)
* shaded cylinders (aka Bonds)
* lines
* text
- intersections these shapes would be *correct*
* atoms displayed at 100% vdwRadius would do the "right thing"
- I've not put much thought into the other shapes that are
in RasMol (ribbons, strands, etc), but I don't think they
would be too difficult.
- I think I could implement it in a month or two of focused work.
So, my questions for you are as follows:
Do *you* think that true 3D rendering functionality this would be
valuable for the Jmol viewer? (By true 3D I mean that objects
intersect correctly, lines/vectors pass through atoms and
come out the other side, etc.)
For the work that *you* are doing, is true 3D rendering important?
Or is the pseudo-3D rendering of Jmol good enough?
For example, is it important to render "charge fields" correctly for the
things you are doing?
If *you* had some "skilled talent" to allocate for a month or two, is
this the area where you would choose spend it?
If not, what would *you* have me work on?
It seems to me that this is the last major piece that we need to start to
make Jmol an acceptable RasMol/Chime substitute. Clearly it would take a
lot more polishing, but all the pieces would be there. What other pieces
are missing?
Do *you* have any interest in a RasMol/Chime substitute?
Let me know what you think.
Miguel
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