The user should then be able to define a storyboard for animation, including cinematic control. Ultimately, it would be desirable for such services to generate complex molecular pictures and animations, while controlling numerous parameters at different stages of image production (molecular representation, view control, rendering control, scene control including light, camera, background, etc.). It appears that one sticking point for online imaging services is the design of an interface to supervise image production. They are based on various molecular graphics programs, such as PyMol, RasMol ( 10), or Dino ( ), that are coupled to free 3D rendering engines such as Molscript ( 11), Raster3D ( 12) or POV-Ray ( ) to improve the quality of the pictures in terms of photorealism. To overcome this difficulty, several online services such as Aismig ( 4), Indie Molecular Movies ( ), Molray ( 5), MovieMaker ( 6), pdb2mgif ( 7), POLYVIEW-3D ( 8) or Protein Picture Generator (PPG) ( 9) have been developed. While quality of software and images produced have been increasing steadily, the complexity of concepts and of software can make the task of producing these high-quality pictures or movies difficult to the inexperienced user. SwissPDBViewer ( 2), VMD ( 3) PyMol ( ), Yasara ( ), Jmol ( ) and many others. As imaging has steadily become a major requirement for scientific communication and teaching, the field continues to grow and new software is regularly developed, e.g. Since then, a huge effort has been put into developing computer graphics systems and software to investigate macromolecular structure and function. Already in the mid 1960s, Cyrus Levinthal and his co-workers produced the first molecular movie (see ) using their ‘model-building’ program ( 1). Visualization of such processes has long been acknowledged as of major importance. Most of today's biological and biochemical studies emphasize molecular function this often implies considering molecular motions or interactions.
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