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Welcome to the BioBlender wiki!
BioBlender was initially developed by our group (SciVis), with the contribution of Mike Pan, as a special version of Blender capable of dealing with molecules, which are complex object, composed of many (up to thousands) atoms, each one connected in a specific way to some others. This was a branch of Blender 2.5 (patched, called BioBlender V0.6, available here: http://www.bioblender.eu/download/)
A couple of years ago, we decided to make an AddOn, and developed BioBlender 1.0 (same download)
That's when the first problems arose:
- Proteins with more than few hundreds atoms take forever to build, due to the updating of the dependency graph each time an atom is added.
- MLP (Molecular lipopohilic potential) cannot be mapped to the mesh, because the vertices are not listed (this I am not sure I perfectly understand).
In the meantime, we wanted to add some more features to BioBlender, first of all the capability of importing and handling two molecular objects in an independent way in the same scene. This led to BioBlender 2.0 which does provide some additional features, but still has the same problems of BB 1.
Right now, problems have been accumulating, starting with a very major one, that is the failure to generate the molecular surface, which was calculated by pyMOL, a program that was very easy and free to install, but is now more complex (unless you pay the present owner, after the death of its creator).
Other problems stem from this one: the representations of both the lipophilic and electrostatic potentials need the surface.
I am not sure this space is the most convenient for discussion, but I do not know of another; therefore, please do write here to communicate not just with me (Monica, the biologist) but also among you (the programmers ).