[Chimera-users] STL file questions

[David Gene Morgan]

Hi,

	I have a couple of questions about the chimera STL files.  I tried to 
open one using chimera to determine whether they contain any color 
information, but I wasn't able to open the file I just wrote.  I don't 
care about that, but I would like to know if they contain color information.

	Is there any way to control the degree of tesselation when writing an 
STL file?  In other words, some STL files are huge because they contain 
huge numbers of triangles (and some 3d printers can't handle overly 
large files).  I am wondering whether it is possible to control the size 
of the output files, which is effectively asking if it is possible to 
control the number of triangles in the file, how finely sampled the 
model is, etc. (however one wants to describe that property).

	Finally, as I understand STL files, they are usually "unscaled" (i.e., 
the co-ordinate system describing the vertices of the triangles doesn't 
have fixed length units).  Is that true for the STL files chimera 
creates?  If I wanted to create two models with an accurate reflection 
of their relative atomic sizes, are there tricks I will need to employ?

-- 
                  David Gene Morgan
              Electron Microscopy Center
                   320C Simon Hall
                   IU Bloomington
                812 856 1457 (office)
                812 856 3221 (3200)
             http://bio.indiana.edu/~cryo