Aonghus, Thank you for taking the time to respond to my posting regard Jmol 3D rendering functionality.
> I am an occasional user of jmol (along with other similar programs eg > VMD, pymol). Jmol has great potential (especially as an applet)- I have > used jmol to render configurations from simulations (basically large > molecules with no bonds). For this, Jmol is _very_ slow to load and > display the configuration- and basic operations like rotation and > zooming are very slow. I don't know if you have had a chance to use the development version of Jmol. The work I have been doing on jmol the last few months has been focused on performance and rendering quality. We are hoping to release it (Jmol v6) within the next few weeks. I would be *very* interested in getting your feedback on Jmol 6 performance. How big are the molecules you are working with? What kind of hardware are you running on? > While this is not the central focus of Jmol > development I think it must be an issue for all users. It seems to me > that moving to Java3D for the rendering will make things worse. I agree. > > The focus of Jmol should be (in my opinion) to offer a fast, simple > pseudo-3D view of a molecule. If you can also do that with a small and > fast applet- that is great. OK > For high quality rendering the focus should > be on developing better povray and postscript output filters. This seems > like an acceptable separation of functionality- for a 3D viewer you > want to be able to manipulate the molecule quickly and quality is not > so important- for printing or publication you want high quality but all > you need is a static image (=> use postscript or povray). If jmol could > provide both things- flexible, fast 3D visualisation and high > (publication) quality output- it would be a fantastic project. The Jmol application has the ability to generate povray output. I have, in fact, been using that as the metric to measure the quality of the jmol shaded sphere rendering. There may even be postscript output ... I am somewhat embarassed to say that I don't know. Again, the Jmol 6 (development) version is slightly better on the parameters it outputs to povray. Have you had a chance to check out the povray generated by Jmol? What do you think? > It might be interesting to check out a similar project: ymol > > http://www.teoroo.mkem.uu.se/daniels/ymol.html Thanks for the reference. I am not familiar with this project, but will check it out. Miguel ------------------------------------------------------- This sf.net email is sponsored by:ThinkGeek Welcome to geek heaven. http://thinkgeek.com/sf _______________________________________________ Jmol-developers mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/jmol-developers
