Re: [PyMOL] Pymol & 3D printing

Hi Joe,

> Thanks for the code!  I find the prospect of using this pretty exciting, and
> hope Warren can incorporate the function and (a) way(s) to call it into the
> distributed code.
> 
> I hope to steal some time to try to try this out here, and to try to
> convince the folks who run the 3D printers on campus to let us print some
> things.
> 
> For future reference, with what version of PyMOL, running in which
> environment, have U Alberta used this code?  It looks pretty
> straightforward, but you never know.

I was running 0.90 compiled from a source tarball, running under
Debian Linux.

> Also, if you or your client would like to comment at all about the size of
> PyMOL files that have been printed (both in terms of output object
> dimensions as well as numbers-of-atoms or molecular weight), I'd be very
> interested in reading about it.  

The molecules were 2 serotonin receptors and 12 serotonin molecules.
Dr. Warren Gallin, the researcher that commisioned the print job,
has sent you some files and some more detailed info about the
science involved.

The actual sizes of the printed serotonin receptors were about
5" x 5" x 4" and the serotonin molecules were about 1" x 1" x 1/4".

A screenshot of one of the serotonin receptors in pymol is here:

http://bebop.cns.ualberta.ca/~cwant/wgallin-pymol.jpg

A picture of the printer output of the receptor with an
orientation roughly matching the screenshot, and a few
serotonin molecules, is here:

http://bebop.cns.ualberta.ca/~cwant/wgallin-3d-printed.jpg
(I hope this is the right molecule ... the 2 receptor
molecules were visually quite similar.)

The 8.5" x 11" paper underneath the molecule should give
a decent indication of the size of the output.

> (From reading the general description of your facility I can translate, for
> instance, size into print times, but whatever PyMOL-specific details you
> want to provide would be great.)

The size in the stl file doesn't matter -- the 3D printing
software allows scaling to any size desired that will
fit within the machine's build volume. The only
thing to note here is that we had to scale all of the
molecules by the same factor for the output to be meaningful.

Regards,
Chris


-- 
Chris Want
Research Computing Support
Computing & Network Services
University of Alberta
Tel: 1-780-492-9418