Viewing the SURFNET surfaces

Viewing the maps in Raster3D

This is an ASCII text file defining all the objects in the scene to be rendered. You can edit the file, say to alter any of the header information, such as the size of the final picture, or the light position, etc.

You can run Raster3D on an SGI machine with the following command:-

render -sgi surfnet.rgb < surfnet.r3d

This creates a ray-traced image in an RGB-format file which can be viewed with the shareware program xv (written by John Bradley, bradley@cis.upenn.edu), display (by ImageMagick), or other graphics viewers.

If plotting surfaces, care needs to be taken not to generate a scene involving too many polygons, else the array limits of Raster3D may be exceeded. As a rough guide, each polygon generated by SURFPLOT requires 12 ``object details'' and 16 ``shadow details'' in Raster3D. So, if your copy of the program is dimensioned for a maximum of 250,000 object details (MAXDET) and as many shadow details (MAXSDT), it will only handle 15,625 polygons altogether.

Example of SURFPLOT output rendered by Raster3D. The faint wire-cage outline defines the binding site of HIV protease (PDB file 7hvp). The inhibitor is show as a ball-and-stick model inside, with the protein sidechains shown around the binding site as thin lines.

Viewing the SURFNET surfaces