Duuude…

Wurst-o-Vision now also runs on Linux. And there is a new shader. -The orange book calls it a lattice shader. Once again, a really pretty and absolutely useless rendering mode. -But see for yourself…

I had another go at writing a simple lightweight protein structure viewer, and I’m almost proud enough of it to let you see the code. Give me a little more time to polish the code and add a couple more features, and it’ll be good to go. I’ve just gotten a ridiculously simple ribbon view to work. It uses the planes defined by the peptide bonds to create a single NURBS surface. As you can see, I still have to come up with a way to deal with missing residues and broken chains. I’m currently using custom shaders implementing the non photorealistic shading model by Gooch et al.. This means OpenGL 2.0 support is required. However the intel graphics chip in my Macbook is starting to limit how pretty my rendering can be (no multisampling/FSAA). Despite all the fancy graphics features I’m experimenting with, startup time is under one second, and animations are perfectly smooth.
Anyway, here’s what it looks like: