Hi Bob -
I also haven't done much of anything with 3D printing myself, but having worked
on the COLLADA exporter as one of my POSF fellowship projects, I can share some
info about the formats themselves and what data is being included in the output
files.
> Q: What output file types are supported? (WRL, X3D, STL[ASCII/binary], other)
The list on the Save wiki page is fairly complete. It reads:
"The file format is autodetected if the extension is .pdb, .pqr, .mol, .sdf,
.pkl, .pkla, .mmd, .out, .dat, .mmod, .pmo, .pov, .png, .pse, .psw, .aln,
.fasta, .obj, .mtl, .wrl, .idtf, .dae, or .mol2."
The 3D formats among these (that I recognize, anyway) are .obj (Wavefront
Object), .mtl (Wavefront Material), .wrl (VRML2), .idtf (Intermediate Data Text
Format), and .dae (COLLADA).
> Q: Does the generation of these include algorithms for ensuring closure or
> for stitching together objects in order to not have ragged overlap?
I'm not sure what you mean by "stitching together objects," but in general, as
long as you have fully closed surfaces, it shouldn't be an issue. The only
situation I can think of that would be problematic is if you had clipping panes
that cut through the object's representation and end up with a hollow,
infinitesimally thin shell. That would be pretty difficult to print. :)
> Q: What is needed to add support struts so that the model is connected and
> strong enough?
No, this is related to what Paul was asking about recently. My guess is some
3D printing software or sites might have more appropriate tools to put these
in, although you could do it manually (and probably quite tediously) with CGO
cylinders or distance dashes with dash_gap = 0 if you know the orientation you
want to use.
> Q: If features are not amenable to printing (labels, perhaps?), are they
> automatically ignored? Need to be manually removed?
As far as I know, none of the supported 3D formats include labels in their
exported data. Each one has its own implementation, but in general,
representations stored within PyMOL as triangle meshes (surfaces and cartoons,
primarily, although you can get everything as triangles with `set use_shaders,
0`) are supported by all of them. The COLLADA exporter also handles spheres,
cylinders, sausages (i.e. rounded cylinders, such as ) and cones. VRML2
includes spheres, cylinders and sausages. The .obj exporter has a bug in
sphere export that I looked at about a year ago but got busy and didn't
actually follow through on. The others I don't know enough about to comment,
but hopefully this gets you on the right track.
If you want to look further into it, check out the
RayRender{VRML2,IDTF,ObjMtl,COLLADA} functions in layer1/Ray.cpp or
layer1/COLLADA.cpp and look for cPrimTriangle, cPrimSphere, etc. for the
various primitive types.
Hope that helps!
Cheers,
Jared
>
> Thanks,
>
> Bob Hanson
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