No partial dot surfaces

[pett]

Once I added surface styles to the Actions menu, it became obvious that, unlike solid and mesh, you cannot show partial dot surfaces. Seems like you should be able to...

[goddard@…]

Dot surfaces work for me

	surface style dot

They are ugly and not useful but they do work.  The ugly part is because the surface triangulation is done by marching cubes so the grid points end up on lines of a 3D lattice, a bad pattern that distracts from the surface shape.  The not useful part is that they are nearly invisible on my retina display.  I have to use silhouettes or select them to see them as in the attached image.  Core OpenGL does not support dots of size other than 1 pixel so it would take some fancy footwork to make the dots larger.  Either a sphere would be needed for every dot (probably too slow as surfaces often have millions of vertices), or a custom shader that draws a disc for each dot.  Does not seem worth it if the dot pattern is as poor as it is.

[goddard@…]

Added by email2trac

[pett]

No, this issue isn't their esthetics, it's that you can't show a partial surface. These commands demonstrate the problem:

open 1zik
surf :12-14. # surface for just these residues shown
surf style dots # entire surface shown

[pett]

Elaine hates the dot-surface esthetics, so I will probably withdraw them from the Actions menu. Therefore I have lowered the priority of this ticket, but the underlying problem is still there.

[Tom Goddard]

Fixed.

Got it, the whole surface was shown as dots even if it had a triangle mask. I made the triangle mask apply to the dots too.