Yeah, the demand for 3-D voxell images may be low at the moment. But I would still consider adding some kind of "add-surface" button to volume-viewer when in surface or mesh-mode. Steve McQuinn made a very pretty picture of phageT4 using a red colored surface in the interior, and a green one on the exterior and it is pretty. (I hope having multiple surfaces doesn't cause end-capping to crash.) Andrew I'll try to keep it down to a dull roar for a little while. On Wed, 2 Mar 2005, Thomas Goddard wrote:
Hi Andrew,
Those are good user interface ideas. Along the lines of your suggestions, I think providing an initial colormap that has more nodes (maybe 3, 4, or 5), and multi-colored (maybe rainbow), would better show off the volume rendering capability. The currrent white cotton ball you see by default in solid rendering mode is not very useful.
That said, I have yet to see a compelling advantage for the solid rendering in molecular structure applications over surface rendering. It is true that 3D medical image scans often are shown with volume rendering, but that data has different characteristics.
Since I have no examples where the solid rendering has proved very effective, enhancing it has low priority.
Still I will keep your color map user interface suggestions in mind with the new surface colormapping tool (not yet released) that uses the same histogram interface. And we also use that histogram interface with the "Render attributes" tool.
Thanks for the suggestions,
Tom
