Thanks, Edward.
Yes, doing more manipulations with space-filling/surfaces is something
I've been thinking about adding. There is less that can automated when
things become more irregular and the meshes become more complex,
however. These tools can be used to do some mixing of surface and
ball-and-stick representations for printing. Here is one I did to
illustrate the base stacking within a B-form DNA duplex surface
(somewhat difficult to photograph):
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2153297
--p
On 05/22/2017 10:17 AM, Edward A. Berry wrote:
That is beautiful!
The pins-and-holes approach might be useful also for space-filling models
of multi-subunit complexes- both for holding the subunits together,
and in
cases where one subunit partially encircles another, the subunit would
be sliced
in half and pins could hold the halves together. That would make an
educational
toy like a chinese puzzle, that you dissassemble and reassemble to see
how the
subunits fit together. Something like cytochrome oxdase (13 subunits),
cytochrome bc1 (dimer of 11 subunits each),or Complex 1 (48? subunits).
eab
On 05/20/2017 09:37 AM, Paul Paukstelis wrote:
Sorry for the somewhat off-topic post.
After getting interested in 3D printing I quickly found that making nice
ball-and-stick objects was very difficult to do on the typical fused
filament printers most people can afford. This is largely because of the
amount of support structures needed for complicated objects.
I've been working on a Blender addon that takes VRML output from most
common programs (PyMol, Chimera, etc.) and allows the user to split the
model up to be printed as individual objects. It generates "pins" and
"holes" to allow the objects to be assembled post-printing.
It has gotten functional enough that I thought I would leave the link
here for those that are interested:
https://github.com/paukstelis/MolPrint
I have used it to print some pretty complex models!
https://thingiverse-production-new.s3.amazonaws.com/renders/0e/87/27/d8/0d/7f0cacf367cc2ed4b01c77705ff16767_preview_featured.JPG
