[Chimera-users] STL Output

[Eric Bell]

Dear Chimera Developers,

My name is Eric Bell, and I am a student at Oberlin College.  I have been using Chimera for 3d printing of molecular models because of its ability to handle many of the processes needed for atom editing as well as its ability to export in an .stl format.  However, an issue I've run into is that the resolution of those .stl meshes is rather high, and there does not exist an option, to my knowledge, to alter the amount of vertices on the spheres.  This causes an issue when we want to print spacefill models of large molecules, because Chimera will output such large files that our software isn't able to properly process the file without serious resource consumption.  Is there anything that I as a user can alter to change the resolution of these spheres, or is it a setting that has been compiled so that I can't edit it without recompiling?  I am familiar with python so navigating code would not be an issue for me if necessary.  Thank you!

Sincerely,
Eric Bell

P.S. Another thing we were looking for that has yet to be done is to print polyhedral models like those in programs such as CrystalMaker.  As far as I know Chimera doesn't have this functionality but a programming environment called Bsoft is using the native save file format of chimera to do it because of its similarity to XML.