From: Lee-Ping Wang (leeping_at_stanford.edu)
Date: Sat Mar 01 2014 - 17:38:38 CST

Hi Ben,

Thanks. I've never worked in a CAVE before but it sounds awesome.

My bootleg solution is to create lots of overlapping polyhedra representations. If each representation randomly fails at drawing a third of the faces, then 5 such overlapping representations will almost always generate all of them.

I am guessing that things should work if I can figure out how to disable the "max number of neighbors = 12" restriction, because then it should be able to draw all the faces.

I would be able to do some really fun things if there were tooltips, but if VMD doesn't natively support it, oh well. :)

Thanks,

- Lee-Ping

On Feb 28, 2014, at 9:22 PM, Benjamin Kaduk <kaduk_at_MIT.EDU> wrote:

> On Fri, 28 Feb 2014, Lee-Ping Wang wrote:
>
>> Hi Ben,
>>
>> Sorry for the extra email. On occasion I want to add extra bits into my VMD visualization to highlight stuff, hence the polyhedra and circles questions. I have thought about using triangles to draw polyhedra, but the higher level wrapper for drawing, say, a dodecahedron could become quite complex (especially if I want to use surface normals to make them look nice).
>
> If I can remember back to ten years ago when I was writing bits for the CAVE, the OpenGL platonic solid primitives are actually from the glut library, which appears to not be used by VMD, in this 1.8.7 tree that I have handy. So, I do not think it would be particularly trivial to add such functionality to VMD, even if we could convince John to take it.
>
> (I also seem to recall that the state of the art in GL programming has moved away from glut, so it may have bitrotted anyway. I've been out of the graphics business for quite some time, so don't take my word as too authoritative.)
>
> -Ben