Spheres

Normal Sphere Representation Example

Representation

To enable the spheres representation do the following for any selection SEL,

show spheres, SEL

OpenGL Shaders & Spheres

Newer OpenGL supported cards (like the NVidia 5950 Ultra, or the 6800 GT Ultra) support Shaders. Shaders are best used for massive numbers of molecules that are to be represented as spheres. Typical ranges will now include 500 000 to 3 000 000 atoms! Take a look, the following example is of a viral nucleocapsid: 261 240 atoms! Performance and visual quality -- without rendering -- are far improved.

Comparing Shaders and No-Shaders

Normal spheres: no shaders

(sphere_mode=5) Shader Spheres

To turn on Sphere Shaders use

set sphere_mode, 5
as spheres, SEL

where SEL is the name of your selection. Getting normal sphere mode back is easy:

set sphere_mode, 4
as spheres, SEL