Raster3D

Raster3D is a set of tools that will help you generate high quality raster images of proteins or other molecules.

The core program renders spheres, triangles, cylinders, and quadric surfaces with specular highlighting, Phong shading, and shadowing.

Raster3D uses an efficient software Z-buffer algorithm which is independent of any graphics hardware. Ancillary programs process atomic coordinates from PDB files into rendering descriptions for pictures composed of ribbons, space-filling atoms, bonds, ball+stick, etc.

Raster3D can also be used to render pictures composed in other programs such as Molscript in glorious 3D with highlights, shadowing, etc. Output is to pixel image files with 24 bits of color information per pixel.

The Raster3D molecular graphics package consists of a core program render and a number of ancillary programs that read atomic coordinates from PDB (Protein Data Bank) files to produce scene descriptions for input to render.