From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Wed Aug 03 2005 - 12:59:09 CDT

Hi,
  You'll want to use MSMS if you want to be able to control the
surface resolution. In order to use MSMS on the Windows version of
VMD, you need to install MSMS on your system somewhere. Once installed,
you'll then need to open "my computer" properties, go to the "advanced"
tab, open the "environment variables" window, and add a new "MSMSSERVER"
environment variable, which should be the fully qualified path to the
MSMS binary installed on your machine. (e.g. "c:\foo\bar\msms.exe" or
whatever...)

Once you've done that, you should be able to use MSMS from within VMD,
and that will give you the best STL surface export.

  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Wed, Aug 03, 2005 at 10:23:02AM -0400, Kevin Smith wrote:
> Hi All,
> I'm trying to convert PDB file to STL format for prototyping need using VMD 1.8.3 (windows). I can render VDW representation to STL without any trouble but I really need "surface" rep to be converted to STL. Problem I'm facing is; surface to STL resolution is very very coarse. In VDW rep I have control to increase the sphere resolution but nothing to change the resolution in "surface" draw mode. Could someone suggest how to make a smoother resolution STL file. I'm not worried about if any STL facets are missing or self intersecting because I can easily fix them with stl editor later on but I can't increase the file resolution.
> By the way I have also tried MSMS draw method but noting appears in graphic window. Any help would be highly appreciated. Thanks in advance.
>
> Regards,
> Kevin
>
>
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-- 
NIH Resource for Macromolecular Modeling and Bioinformatics
Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
University of Illinois, 405 N. Mathews Ave, Urbana, IL 61801
Email: johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu                 Phone: 217-244-3349
  WWW: http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/~johns/      Fax: 217-244-6078