VMD-L Mailing List

From: Samuel C Flores (samuel.flores_at_yale.edu)
Date: Thu Nov 30 2006 - 12:37:04 CST

Beautiful. I once wrote a program to turn an STL model into slices, which
we then cut out of metal and brazed together to make a model like the one
you described. Vertical pin guides incorporated into the STL model were
used to align the slices. Unfortunately it's gone now (that was years ago).
Significant coding was required, so I would say your idea of using the
clipping plane manually is probably the quickest way. Even if you can get a
code you would still have to adapt it to give you the proper spacing between
layers, scale and orient the slices, and print them out.

 

What a great project.

 

Sam

 

Samuel Flores

Gerstein Lab

office:

266 Whitney Ave., Bass 437

New Haven, CT 06520

203.432.5405

 

Home:

120 Huntington Street

New Haven, CT 06511

cell: 203.747.2682

  _____

From: owner-vmd-l_at_ks.uiuc.edu [mailto:owner-vmd-l_at_ks.uiuc.edu] On Behalf Of
Morizono, Hiroki
Sent: Thursday, November 30, 2006 10:08 AM
To: vmd-l_at_ks.uiuc.edu
Subject: vmd-l: Poor man's stereolithography

 

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