VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Tue Jul 11 2006 - 11:06:43 CDT

Hi,
  From what I understand, the native Blender .blend file format is
very version specific, changes with every release, and people suggest
you not use it directly. STL is not an appropriate format to use to
import VMD scenes into Blender as you've discovered, it's meant to be
used for Stereolithography, but not much else. What other formats have
you tried importing into Blender? If you know of a file format that
Blender supports well, I'd certainly consider writing an export module
for VMD to better support it. I would have expected Wavefront OBJ
or one of the VRML formats work ok with Blender already.

Here's a discussion of why the .blend file format isn't documented etc:
  http://www.blender.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=8143&sid=ced5749c0154f65b37501dd929205166

There is now a "BlendXML" development effort in progress to make a Blender
scene file format that's usable by other software, but as far as I can tell
it's far from finished.

  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Tue, Jul 11, 2006 at 09:32:31AM -0600, Ralph Jimenez wrote:
> It would be great to use VMD's output with an open-source 3D
> modelling/animation program like Blender (www.blender.org). This program
> can be used to make some fantastic images and animations, output video
> files, etc. It would make a nice combination with VMD.
> I've been able to read .STL files into blender, but the other formats
> do not work very well. Even with STL, the lights are not imported, and
> the molecule is imported as one mesh object- no separate
> cofactor/protein, for example. So my feature request is for VMD to write
> Blender scene files...
> I'm curious...has anyone else tried using Blender with VMD?
>
> --
> Ralph Jimenez, Ph.D.
> JILA/NIST and Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry
> 440 UCB
> University of Colorado, Boulder
> Boulder, CO 80309-0440
>
> Tel: (303) 492-8439
> FAX: (303) 492-5235
>
> http://jilawww.colorado.edu/JimenezLab 

-- 
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