Difference between revisions of "Blender"

Latest revision as of 01:48, 25 October 2014

HELP! : Fellow Blenderheads please help improve this page!!!

Introduction

This is an attempt at using Blender, an open-source, free, 3D modeling software to render, pose and animate objects exported from Pymol.

Blender may be downloaded freely for all major platforms (Win/Mac/Linux), from: http://www.blender.org/download/get-blender/

A great starting place for getting comfortable with Blender is the Blender Wiki: http://wiki.blender.org/

These tutorials are for Windows.

Tutorials

Representative examples. Please change/improve.

1. Importing a PyMol Structure into Blender

2. Translucent Surfaces

High quality translucent surfaces, better than PyMOL's internal renderer/ray-tracer.

3. Joining Atoms

Why Blender?

Blender is FREE (as in beer)
Blender is Open Source and therefore FREE (as in freedom)
Blender is an extremely capable 3D graphics program and perhaps the only FOSS program capable of taking on similar commercial software head-to-head (Maya/Max/Modo etc.)
To see some examples of what Blender can do check out:

Blender Help

Blender is a perfect complement to PyMOL for creating high quality images and animation, but has a pretty steep learning curve. The following are a few resources that may be of help along the way:

References

Blender : http://www.blender.org/

@@ Line 20: / Line 20: @@
 High quality translucent surfaces, better than PyMOL's internal renderer/ray-tracer.
-=== 3. Joining Atoms ===
+=== [[3. Joining Atoms]] ===
-* '''Step 1'''
-When a molecule is imported into Blender from a PyMOL export (see the first tutorial), it will look like this:
-[[Image:Starting.png|center|350px]]
-(2,3-BPG from 1B86.pdb)
-* '''Step 2'''
-The problem is that this molecule is actually an assembly of spheres and cylinders. When the individual parts are selected using the Shift+right-click method (for scaling, rotating, moving, etc.), some parts are unable to be selected and are left behind. This ruins the molecule:
-[[Image:Theproblem.png|center|350px]]
-* '''Step 3'''
-This problem is solved by grouping the individual pieces. Press '''b''' to launch the Blender bounding box tool:
-[[Image:Boundingboxstart.png|center|350px]]
-Left-click and drag over the entire molecule. This will select all the pieces:
-[[Image:Boundingboxsel.png|center|350px]]
-(selecting)
-[[Image:Segregated_molecule.png|center|350px]]
-(all molecule parts selected)
-* '''Step 4'''
-Press '''Ctrl''' + '''j''' to join all the parts. The final product should look like this:
-[[Image:Final_molecule.png|center|350px]]
-And there you go! Now the molecule can be moved, rotated, scaled, colored etc. as a whole entity, and selected with a single right-click.
-* '''Step 5'''
-If you are dealing with more than one molecule, you may want to import them into different layers, group them there, and then move them to the main layer.
 == Why Blender? ==