Hi Christophe,
Because your isolated atoms are spaced much further apart than for an actual molecule, computing a surface with the default parameters (probe radius 1.4Å and grid spacing of 0.5Å takes a very long time and produces a surface that looks like your isolated spheres anyway because the small probe radius doesn’t join any of your “atoms” together.  Try this command:

surf probe 20 grid 5

You can play around with the actual probe and grid values, just don’t use anything near their default values!

—Eric

Eric Pettersen
UCSF Computer Graphics Lab


On Nov 27, 2019, at 3:13 AM, Christophe Leterrier <christophe.leterrier@univ-amu.fr> wrote:

Hi,

I'm trying to use ChimeraX to visualize Single-Molecule Localization Microscopy (SMLM) data. In short, the output of an SMLM acquisition and processing is a list of fluorophores XYZ coordinates with associated uncertainty, that can be used to reconstruct a 3D image.

I have made a script that make a pdb file from these localization so that I can directly display the resulting structure as if it was a protein with a number of random atoms (the only difference is that angstroms in ChimeraX are really nanometers in my data). The rendered pqr file is here (I use a pqr pdb format to specify the radius to the localization uncertainty, hence the variable diameter of each sphere):
The rendering with the "Spheres" view of atoms works well, see a screenshot here:

However, when I try to get the enveloppe of the resulting object using the "Surfaces" display (click on Surfaces>Show), ChimeraX hangs (I'm on OSX and get the dreaded infinite rainbow beachball).

Is there a chance that I can get ChimeraX to render the enveloppe object this way, or is it really too far from what it's supposed to do? I can imagine that I'm trying to use ChimeraX for something completely different than its intended use, but it definitely has a lot of potential for this.

Thank you,

--
Christophe Leterrier
NeuroCyto lab
INP CNRS UMR 7051
Aix Marseille University, France


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