imho, 3DS is currently more widely supported than X3D by expensive, cheap, and free 3d modellers. Most 3D format translators can convert from 3DS to other types (DXF, iv, etc). However it looks like from web3d.org that X3D is much more versatile and feature rich than old 3ds... Quoting Greg Couch <gregc@cgl.ucsf.edu>:

We currently only support VRML export of volume isosurfaces and multiscale surfaces. So the answer is no, not yet.

Exporting to a 3D graphics file format is definately something we would like to do. However, it is unclear what format would be best to generate. VRML 2.0 will never support transparency like chimera does. VRML's successor, X3D, looks promising, but there aren't many users yet. Other possiblities include the Renderman format, popular with animation studios; the .3DS format, popular on PCs; and many others.

So, a question for everyone reading this, if you had to pick one format, would it be VRML97? And if so, why? And if not, why not? We are leaning torwards outputing X3D, but would appreciate comments from people who would actually be using the output.

Greg Couch UCSF Computer Graphics Lab gregc@cgl.ucsf.edu

On Fri, 21 May 2004, Pattanayek, Sabuj wrote:

...

Is there anyway to export a pdb model into vrml once I have it just the way I want it (ribbon & atom sizes, colors, etc)? I tried a pdb2vrml converter from http://www.pc.chemie.tu-darmstadt.de/research/vrml/pdb2vrml_right.shtml but freewrl crashes when loading the output (I think pdb2vrml might be outputting vrml 1.0), it's also not very versatile as far as what I want to display into vrml from the pdb.