Raster3D
is a set of tools for generating high quality raster
images of proteins or other molecules. The core program renders
spheres, triangles, cylinders, and quadric surfaces with specular highlighting,
Phong shading, and shadowing. It uses an efficient software
Z-buffer algorithm which is independent of any graphics hardware.
Ancillary programs process atomic coordinates from PDB
files into rendering descriptions for pictures composed of ribbons,
space-filling atoms, bonds, ball+stick, etc. Raster3D can also be
used to render pictures composed in other programs such as
Molscript
in glorious 3D with highlights, shadowing, etc. Output is to
pixel image files with 24 bits of color information per pixel.
The current version is 3.0 (last changed: 29-Sep-2020)
New in this version:
works with gfortran version 10 (changed compiler flags, octal constants)
Source and documentation for core programs avs2ps, balls, normal3d,
rastep, ribbon, rods, rings3d, stereo3d and render.
Makefiles are provided for various linux, unix, OSX environments.
This is a tarball containing executables built using the Intel ifort
compiler on 32-bit OSX version 10.5. It also contains the full source,
documentation, examples, etc, and a matching shared library for
libgd version 2.0.36 that the render executable is linked against.
The libgd source is available here.
Images produced by the demonstration/verification scripts
in the Raster3D distribution
References
original implementation:
Bacon, David J. and Anderson, Wayne F. (1988).
"A Fast Algorithm for Rendering Space-Filling Molecule Pictures."
Journal of Molecular Graphics 6, 219-220.
version 2.0:
Merritt, Ethan A. and Murphy, Michael E.P. (1994).
"Raster3D Version 2.0: A Program for Photorealistic Molecular Graphics"
Acta Cryst. D50, 869-873.
version 2.3:
Merritt, Ethan A. and Bacon, David J. (1997).
"Raster3D: Photorealistic Molecular Graphics"
Methods in Enzymology 277, 505-524.
Rendering core originally written by David J. Bacon and Wayne F. Anderson;
extensions, revisions, modifications, ancillary programs by
Mark Israel, Stephen Samuel, Michael Murphy, Albert Berghuis,
and Ethan A Merritt
The contents of the current view window in a Coot session may be rendered in
Raster3D using the <F8> hotkey. More complicated scripting from Coot
is also possible.
Coot home page
ImageMagick
As a general tool for image viewing and manipulation
(including annotation and format conversion)
I recommend John Christy's ImageMagick, which is
available from the ImageMagick web page at
www.ImageMagick.org
and is included by default in many linux distributions.
Figure generation and analysis tool for RNA and DNA structures.
X3DNA Web site:
x3dna.org.
XtalView
Very nice open-source crystallographic package for model-building,
map-fitting, etc. with direct output to Raster3D for figure generation.
XtalView web site
http://www.sdsc.edu/CCMS/Packages/XTALVIEW/
Biomolecular Structure Center at the University of Washington / merritt@u.washington.edu
