[chimerax-users] Save ribbons and surfaces with minimal amount of vertices/faces

[Sarah Piper]

Hi ChimeraX team and others,
I got a bit of an unusual question and am interested to see whether it is
possible!

I am trying to use a short helix in ribbon style from ChimeraX into
Blender, and use it to create a 'skeleton' for animations. For this, it
would be most useful to have as few vertices as possible for the helix
(basically only the 'invisible' coordinates themselves as 'line', instead
of having it as a 3D view/thick helix.
When I export a helix even with a very thin ribbon style through the
command line (e.g. width and thickness to 0.1), this is unfortunately still
too thick and creates too many vertices/faces. Setting these values to 0
gives errors.

I have looked at the ribbon style editor in Chimera as well, and
unfortunately the minimum settings are 0.05. Would it be possible to
somehow set any of these parameters to 0 and save this as a file format
suitable for 3D softwares (e.g. .glb)? Would it work through a
python script potentially? (I'm not familiar with python in chimera yet but
happy to learn more about this).
And if so, would this be also applicable for surfaces, to reduce the
numbers of vertices/faces that are exported?

On another note, I was wondering whether it would be possible to set the
chimaera scene 'world origin' to a particular coordinate set; I think in
Pymol this is possible with resetting the camera view:

cmd.set_view([ 1.0,   0.0,   0.0,               0.0,   1.0,   0.0,
          0.0,   0.0,   1.0,               0.0,   0.0,   0.0,
     0.0,   0.0,   0.0,              40.0, 100.0, -20.0])



Sorry for these unusual question but looking forward to hearing back from
anyone who might have any suggestions!

Cheers,

Sarah
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://plato.cgl.ucsf.edu/pipermail/chimerax-users/attachments/20211212/a9d857a0/attachment.html>