VMD-L Mailing List

From: Marc Baaden (baaden_at_smplinux.de)
Date: Tue Aug 31 2004 - 16:36:05 CDT

Hi John,

I completely agree about the VRML2 viewers being very unstable and
not conforming to the full standard. I haven't really got a solution.
But the ones that were most usable were freewrl and lookat (from the
openvrml lib). Most viewing I do now with the free (for PC and Mac)
Cortona VRML plugin.
Although not a viewer, the white dune VRML editor does a reasonable
job at showing VRML scenes.
More specific (to SGI and Windows) is Cosmo Worlds and Player.
There might also be some tool to convert complex scenes to simpler
primitives. I don't remember where I have seen this, I think it was
either Chisel (Java tool for VRML cleanup) or the white dune editor.

But as far as I know all viewers support viewpoints without problems,
which would already be a start. A second option in order to make
rotations "easier" would be to re-center the VMD scene about the current
rotation center in VMD before export.

All other things (lightsources etc.) are IMHO not really essential.

Cheers,
Marc

>>Marc,
>> You're right, the VRML2 export in VMD is fairly simple.
>> This is mainly a result of the problems I had with various VRML2
>> viewer programs that didn't parse the full file format. What viewer
>> program are you using? It should be easy to fix if I could find a
>> decent free VRML2 viewer that doesn't choke on syntactically correct
>> VRML2 files.

  Marc Baaden