VMD-L Mailing List

From: Benjamin Kaduk (kaduk_at_mit.edu)
Date: Fri Feb 28 2014 - 23:22:48 CST

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