[Chimera-users] Exporting from Chimera to Blender - basic questions.

[Waight, Andrew]

Hello all, 

       I have recently solved the structure of a novel membrane protein, and have been using chimera quite a bit for my figures and analysis. In my free time I have been playing around with the 3D animation package Blender which I must say is a total blast, and makes fantastic movies and animations. However exporting from Chimera to Blender is a little tricky, in that when using VRML2 or X3D formats while the actual 3D "mesh vertices" import quite well, the colors are not imported, and imported items such as cartoon helices seem to have totally random materials assigned to nonsensical segments (instead of materials assigned by chain for example) . Ideally I would like to perform and export the coloring operations using chimera because it's obviously an order of magnitude easier to select residues, chains and monomers with chimera. Or at least have the grouping of objects imported correctly. This is really just for fun so I'd thought I'd ask if anyone here has any experience with importing Chimera models into Blender. Of course I have no idea how VRML2 actually works. Thanks all.

                                                Andrew Waight	
                                                     Wang Lab
                    Skirball Institute of Biomedical Sciences
                                       NYU School of Medicine

P.S. Extra Credit: Does anyone have any idea how to export the calculated electrostatic surface into UV mapping for a Blender Object (the surface mesh obviously)? 

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