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Hi, I have written a Wavefront OBJ exporter for Jmol. If you are interested, I would be happy to send the files. Some background: I have found the OBJ format to be the mostly likely format to be supported by 3D modeling software. There is a list in the following reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wavefront_.obj_file and it includes most of the popular programs from Blender to Photoshop. This includes Maya, and the Wavefront OBJ exporter would likely be a better choice for Maya than the Jmol Maya exporter, I think. I would also note that Pymol exports OBJ. The format is relatively simple, and the above link includes a good specification of the format. My reason for doing this was to get molecular models into 3D modeling programs. The only Jmol format that is a viable candidate is U3D, obtained through the rather involved procedure described in your pages. U3D is not a particularly popular format, and is supported mostly by Adobe. This procedure clearly makes good PDFs, but I found the U3D files created are not very usable. Photoshop (by Adobe ;-) does read U3D, but gets errors with all the U3D files I have tried from Jmol and fails to even read some of them. This is probably not a bug in Photoshop, as I have found it to read very complicated U3D files from other sources than Jmol -> IDTF -> IDTFConverter -> U3D. Whether this is a problem with the JMol IDTF exporter or the IDTFConverter, I cannot say. IDTF is certainly not a popular format in any event. So I did the OBJ exporter. It appears to work for ball-and-stick models, and works in all the 3D programs I have access to. It implements all the outputXxx() routines necessary to do ball-and-stick. I also implemented: outputCone outputTextPixel outputTriangle but I did not test them. I am only a causal user of Jmol, and don't know what to use for test cases for these. I did not implement: outputFace outputSurface It would take too much time to figure out what these (surfaces at least) are supposed to do, and again, I don't have test cases. It would probably be easier for a Jmol person, to look at what I did and fix it for surfaces or work with me a bit. (This is, of course, assuming you are even interested ;-) As far as testing what I did, most of the 3D modeling programs are pricey and all have a steep and long learning curve. Unless you already have one of these, MeshLab would be the best bet. My background is that, as mentioned, I am a casual Jmol user and not a Chemist nor Biologist. I have an intermediate, not advanced, knowledge of 3D modeling programs. It took less time to write the exporter than I spent messing around trying to make things work with the existing situation. -Ken |
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