BioBlender: Blender for Biologists

Sounds really cool!<p>We usually just use PyMOL [1] in our lab, but it looks like BioBlender takes PyMOL, Blender, and a few other structural biology and builds on top of both of them.<p>It looks like the biggest contribution from BioBlender is that it takes properties such as electrostatic potential and combines it with Blender's physics engine to better simulate movement when creating molecular animations. Most of our work usually involves just examining the 3D structure of a protein, so I don't usually create animations, but this is definitely a really useful tool to do so if any lab might ever need to do something like that.<p>We really do need more people dedicated to just purely better visualization software in the biological community. A lot of interesting hypotheses often start from just rotating around 3D structures, and making it easier to do so can only help.<p>[1]: <a href="http://pymol.org/" rel="nofollow">http://pymol.org/</a>

I have been wanting to get into bioinformatics, but there's something I miss coming from webdev: the ability to create something over a few weeks. I don't mean I want to discover something new, and I'm not sure I'd want to get into research at all. I wanted to be able to experiment and <i></i>see<i></i> stuff show up on a screen related to the structures and formulas I'm learning. Some fun and practical, even if not very useful (games?), project I can tackle while learning bioinformatics. Is there such a thing?

(Applause)<p>I have always admired Blender in general, and interfacing it it to load molecular structures like this is genius. I hope it's the first of many such explorations. Although I'm not a biologist this is cool enough that I would install blender again just to have fun with making neat images.

Great to see so many structural biologists and crystallographers on HN!<p>PyMOL has been progressing leaps and bounds over the last few years under Jason Vertrees guidance at Schrodinger LLC. So do give it a look if you are excited about this stuff. The development model is also quite nice, in that the most avant-garde features are released in the 'incentive' version (costs money) but then are released into the open source version after the next version update, sometimes even earlier.<p>It has been a personal interest of mine to use Blender and PyMOL together for visualization and graphics[0].<p>Good luck to BioBlender and thanks for sharing on HN!<p>[0] <a href="http://pymolwiki.org/index.php/Blender" rel="nofollow">http://pymolwiki.org/index.php/Blender</a>

This looks interesting but doesn't appear to have been updated in a year and a half unfortunately.

Cool!<p>how is this comparable with avogadro?<p><a href="http://avogadro.openmolecules.net/wiki/Main_Page" rel="nofollow">http://avogadro.openmolecules.net/wiki/Main_Page</a>

Does anyone know how to 3D-print protein structures?

It looks really cool, but I cannot figure out how to use the program to open up crystal structures (PDB file format) on my desktop.