On Dec 14, 2007, at 3:30 AM, William Stein wrote:

> On Dec 14, 2007 3:14 AM, Robert Bradshaw  
> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>>
>> I am extremely impressed! It seems to be specifically optimized for
>> rendering molecules, but I'm going to write an exporter for our 3d
>> shapes as meshes and see how well it does.
>
> There is an amazing amount of mathematics, especially combinatorial
> structures, etc., for which those sorts of things might be quite
> good for us.

Yes, for sure. The fact that it natively handles spheres (and  
cylinders) is a big plus.

> By the way, I just got it to work in Sage via the following nutty  
> sequence
> of hacks (see attached screen shot):

It was pretty easy to add pmesh output to IndexFaceSet (which  
underlies all triangulated shapes). I haven't gotten much further  
than that, but one drawback is that it seems we might need a bunch of  
separate files to represent a single object. (Of course, it is open  
source, so we could define our own conglomerate format. Also, perhaps  
we could pass them around as a single zipped file (both python and  
java have pretty good support, and it would compress the highly- 
redundant format as well).

It starts to get sluggish at 20 tori (<1K polygons each), wheras the  
OpenGL stuff doesn't break a sweat until the much, much higher. I  
don't see any options for controlling lighting, and the camera seems  
much more limited too.

Being pure java is a huge plus though, as is it being maintained,  
used, and developed by a larger audience. And it's pretty Got to hand  
it to those chemists!

- Robert


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