VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Thu Nov 30 2006 - 10:42:08 CST

Hi,
  You could use VMD with an orthographic projection and a moving clipping
plane to create snapshots of your slices that way. That would be an easy
way to generate a set of printouts of slices. For the clipping plane, I'd
use a user-defined clipping plane and I'd set the position precisely using
a script so that you get even slice spacing. You might find it useful to
try the Postscript output in that case, since it will emit vector graphics
which will scale to arbitrary size. You could make the slices from cardboard,
foam core, balsa wood, or various other things as long as you had an easy
way to cut the slices out. For the thicker materials you might need to use
a router, jigsaw, or something similar. Once glued together you
could concievably trim the edges with a Dremel tool and a sanding disc or
something similar to round them off if you weren't looking to retain the
sliced look.
  
  John

On Thu, Nov 30, 2006 at 10:07:51AM -0500, Morizono, Hiroki wrote:
> This is slightly off topic--but it originates from VMD--
> my kids saw the physical models of the light harvesting complex, and
> wanted to build space filled protein structures as
> holiday ornaments, and we were looking for any pointers on how to go about it.
> (without the cost associated with 3Dpowder and a Zprinter)
> The thought was to somehow output slices at some reasonable Z spacing
> as a set of images, glue them to cardboard, cut them out (imps with scissors work for cheap,
> and it keeps them occupied) and assemble them like the bust of Arthur Fiedler
> near the Boston Half Shell. http://www.bostonfiremuseum.com/fiedler_photo_gallery/Image4.gif
> Can VMD do this directly?
> Alternatively, does anyone know of any VRML or STL manipulation program,
> preferably open source, that might help accomplish this?
> Another thought was to use clipping planes, and move the clipping plane up, capture
> each image frame, and print those.
> Are there any better solutions?
>
> Thanks,
> Hiroki
>
> 

-- 
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