Hello, Tachyon3d is a raytracing program that has served Sage very very well for easy-to-produce standalone fast simple 3d raytracing. It was written by a chemist for visualizing molecules, etc.
I found a page (http://www.openscience.org/blog/) that recommends Sage, and when scrolling down it noticed that it had a very solid no-install-needed lightweight but extremely high quality and tasty molecule of caffeine embedded in it. Following the link I found http://jmol.sourceforge.net/ which is a totally frickin' awesome 3d Java chemistry visualization toolkit. If you've been following the large amount of brainstorming about 3d graphics and Sage over the last few weeks, definitely check out that above link, and links like this: http://jmol.sourceforge.net/#What%20the%20critics%20are%20saying Definitely try this out: http://jmol.sourceforge.net/demo/ it is very very impressive. Yes, it appears to be aimed at chemistry, but if you look at the examples, and at the API documentation, you'll see that it's somewhat similar to tachyon, and has things like: --------------- pmesh meshID [option] "filename.pmesh" With the pmesh command you can add one or more surfaces to a model. The pmesh command is similar to the isosurface command in terms of options. The pmesh command takes the overall format... --------------- So, just as with Tachyon, it's conceivable that jmol could be just the right tool for the job, finally. We shall see. By the way, a large amount of the work that Robert Bradshaw put into 3d graphics and Java3d last summer was really in writing fast Cython code for generating 3d models from scene descriptions (building on work of Tom Boothby and Josh Kantor). That same work would carry over to jmol. -- William -- William Stein Associate Professor of Mathematics University of Washington http://wstein.org --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://sage.scipy.org/sage/ and http://modular.math.washington.edu/sage/ -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
