[chimera-dev] suggestions for better STL export - remove internal, reduce atom vertices

[Jakob Suckale]

Dear Chimera developers,

Chimera has the great feature of STL export, very useful for 3D printing
models for research and teaching. May I make two suggestion to improve this
feature even further.


1 - Remove invisible internal and therefore unnecessary structures.

Chimera generates a lot of internal structures that complicate printing and
are pointless for STLs. This includes inside surfaces at the end of ribbon
cartoons (red below).
[image: Inline images 1]
as well as copious amounts of invisible internal surfaces for wire and ball
and stick models.
[image: Inline images 2]
If these were automatically removed, STLs would not only be much smaller
but also much easier to print without remashing.


2 - Reduce the number of vertices for atom models.

Ribbon conversion to vertices is already good, but as can bee seen above
atom models are converted using far too many vertices inflating the
resulting STL files. I'm aware that this has been discussed and listed
previously as a bug but the problem remains and makes for difficult to use
STLs and bad 3D prints.

Best regards,


Jakob Suckale, PhD
Lecturer in Biochemistry
University of Tübingen
+49-7071-29-73363
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