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Pardon my ignorance, but what is so unique or special about molecular visualisation compared to, say, Quake - or CAD? If you’ll permit me to reduce it down to “

Pardon my ignorance, but what is so unique or special about molecular visualisation compared to, say, Quake - or CAD? If you’ll permit me to reduce it down to “just” drawing organo-chem hexagons, lines, and red/grey/black spheres connecting those lines (and a 360-degrees spin animation for the investor-relations video) - where’s the room for the rest of CG? E.g., texture-mapping, fragment shaders, and displacement mapping?

justsomehnguy 3y ago
3D games make a lot of smokescreen and mirrors to make you believe you see a lot. Not looking it up right now but the original Q1 had a very low poly count.
dalke 3y ago
Quakes came out in, what, 1996? And was written by some of the foremost practitioners of computer graphics? We were a couple of physics grad students working on a side project in late 1993. My background was a semester course based on Foley & van Dam. Hardware gave us a 5-10 year lead over what we could have done with consumer tech. There wasn't really a "rest of CG". Only the highest-end SGI machines at the time had hardware texture mapping - most did it in software (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_Graphics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_Graphics). We aren't talking 2D organo-chem hexagons, but 3D spheres and cylinders. Back around 1995 I posted some benchmarks to Usenet about the different approaches I tried (including NURBS), but I can no longer find a copy of it. The straight-forward way is to render the spheres as a bunch of triangles, so, what, 50 polygons per sphere? Times 100,000 spheres = 5 million polygons. That was large for the time, but doable. Plus, during movement we used a lower level of detail. What was Quake's polygon count? Oh, and we're displaying animated molecules, including interacting with a live physics simulation, so no pre-computed BSP either. Rastering spheres quickly on a PC was also possible then, which was RasMol's forte, but it was flat compared to having a couple hardware-based point lights plus ambient lighting. Interestingly, AutoCAD (RIP Walker) tried to get into molecular modeling, but it didn't work out. https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/e5/chapter2_82.html https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/e5/chapter2_82.html

justsomehnguy 3y ago

3D games make a lot of smokescreen and mirrors to make you believe you see a lot. Not looking it up right now but the original Q1 had a very low poly count.

dalke 3y ago

Quakes came out in, what, 1996? And was written by some of the foremost practitioners of computer graphics? We were a couple of physics grad students working on a side project in late 1993. My background was a semester course based on Foley & van Dam. Hardware gave us a 5-10 year lead over what we could have done with consumer tech. There wasn't really a "rest of CG". Only the highest-end SGI machines at the time had hardware texture mapping - most did it in software (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_Graphics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_Graphics). We aren't talking 2D organo-chem hexagons, but 3D spheres and cylinders. Back around 1995 I posted some benchmarks to Usenet about the different approaches I tried (including NURBS), but I can no longer find a copy of it. The straight-forward way is to render the spheres as a bunch of triangles, so, what, 50 polygons per sphere? Times 100,000 spheres = 5 million polygons. That was large for the time, but doable. Plus, during movement we used a lower level of detail. What was Quake's polygon count? Oh, and we're displaying animated molecules, including interacting with a live physics simulation, so no pre-computed BSP either. Rastering spheres quickly on a PC was also possible then, which was RasMol's forte, but it was flat compared to having a couple hardware-based point lights plus ambient lighting. Interestingly, AutoCAD (RIP Walker) tried to get into molecular modeling, but it didn't work out. https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/e5/chapter2_82.html https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/e5/chapter2_82.html