Interactive shadows (shadows that move as structures are moved) can be enabled in the Effects dialog or with the command set shadows. Click the image to show a small molecule rotating above a rectangular plane. This simple animation was made with the Chimera command script tumble.com. Interactive shadows also work with ribbons, surfaces, and other representations.

Potassium channel (Protein Data Bank entry 1bl8) on a dark slate blue background with potassium ions shown in firebrick. The channel is comprised of four chains. Each chain has been rainbow-colored from blue at the N-terminus to red at the C-terminus, but only the surface of the channel is shown. The surface has been sliced with a per-model clipping plane. The surface cap color is plum except with opacity set to 0.8. The shininess and brightness have been set to 128 and 8, respectively, and the lights on the scene have been moved from their default positions. The subdivision quality (related to the smoothness of the spherical ions) is 5.0, and the molecular surface was computed with probe radius and vertex density set to 1.0 and 6.0, respectively. (More samples...)