making visuals with technology

Introducing… a flat, boring porins protein, this is how most scientific vistualization would show it.

What’s wrong with the image?  Well technically nothing, it’s scientifically accurate, each atom is color coded to represent an element, and it even rotates so that you can see the overall structure of protein.  But can we do better?  You bet!

Click here to see the exact same porins protein, but with a much advanced shading model, I think it’s clear why this one is superior.  With ambient occlusion, in which the model is shaded based on how likely an area is occluded because of surrounding objects, the spatial structure of the protein is much easier to understand.  And with today’s super fast GPUs, doing a screen-space ambient occlusion is virtually instant.

And if anyone is curious, the software I used to generate the graph is CuteMol, an

interactive, high quality molecular visualization system. QuteMol exploits the current GPU capabilites through OpenGL shaders to offers an array of innovative visual effects. QuteMol visualization techniques are aimed at improving clarity and an easier understanding of the 3D shape and structure of large molecules or complex proteins.