ProteinShader
Illustrative Rendering of Macromolecules
|
|
|
|
Potasium Channel
[PDB:1BL8]
|
Retinol-Binding Protein
[PDB:1AQB]
|
Ribonuclease Inhibitor
[PDB:2BNH]
|
Porin
[PDB:3POR]
|
Art is the lie that helps tell the truth. - Pablo Picasso
Overview
By exploiting recent advances in programmable graphics cards, the ProteinShader
program can produce illustrative renderings of proteins that approximate what
an artist might create using pen and ink. The custom texture mapping and
lighting calculations for rendering these images are implemented using vertex
and fragment shaders written in the OpenGL Shading Language, which is supported
on most new graphics cards for ordinary desktop and laptop computers. Vertex
and fragment shaders are also used for mapping text labels and decorative
textures onto the curved surfaces of tubes and ribbons shown in color.
ProteinShader is a free, open-source molecular visualization project distributed
under the GNU General Public License.
To run this platform-independent program a computer must have Java 1.5 or
higher and a graphics card that supports at least OpenGL 2.0 (see the
Getting Started page for details on system
requirements). The most recent version of the program can be obtained from the
ProteinShader Download page on SourceForge, and help on using the program
can be found by using the links and menus in the navigation box on the left
side of this page.
The ProteinShader program knows how to read a
Protein Data Bank
structure file, which is essentially a listing of the xyz-coordinates of
the atoms in a protein. The protein can be displayed in either an atom-style
or a cartoon-style view. An atom-style display uses spheres and cylinders to
represent atoms and bonds, respectively, while a cartoon view uses ribbons or
tubes to represent the backbone of the protein. The appearance of these
displays can be modified extensively with a retractable control panel on
the right side of the canvas, and the
ProteinShader Tutorials use several
example proteins to help familiarize the user with the control panel.
The images on the canvas can be rotated by dragging a mouse across the canvas
or by using a control panel to specify constant rotation. A menu can be used
to save a static image as either a PNG
(Portable Network Graphics)
or JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group)
file. To produce publication quality images, an
Antialiasing
control panel can be used to smooth out the rough edges that are often
associated with computer generated images.
Citing
ProteinShader is citeware, so if you use images obtained with
it in a publication, please cite the following paper:
Weber JR: ProteinShader: illustrative rendering of macromolecules.
BMC Structural Biology 2009, 9:19.
BMC Structural Biology is an open access Journal, so the ProteinShader paper
can be downloaded for free at this URL:
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6807/9/19
The ProteinShader program was written by Joe Weber as a Master's thesis
project for the ALM in IT program at the Harvard University Extension School.
The
ProteinShader thesis document
can be downloaded as a PDF file. The source code included in the
thesis is no longer current, so download the
ProteinShader program and look in the src
subdirectory for the most up to date code. Also, there is some minor
degradation of image quality from saving the thesis document as a compressed
PDF, and an antialiasing (image edge smoothing) feature and several other
refinements have been added since the thesis was written.
Development Notes
For software engineers who want to modify the ProteinShader program, the
Development Notes
page includes directions on how to compile the source code using Ant,
and also gives a brief overview of the ProteinShader program's major
packages. A more detailed description of the program's packages, classes,
and methods is given in the
ProteinShader API, which was generated by using
the Javadoc tool.
A short summary of the most important algorithms used by the ProteinShader
program is given in the next section. More detailed expanations can
be found in the
ProteinShader journal article
cited above and in the
ProteinShader thesis document.
Illustrative rendering algorithms
To create pen-and-ink style images, the ProteinShader program uses the
real-time halftoning technique of Freudenberg, Masuch, and Strothotte
[1, 2]. Color images
of ribbons and tubes are converted to grayscale using the equation
gray = 0.30 red + 0.59 green + 0.12 blue,
and then texture mapping is used to mix a halftone screen (an image file) with
the grayscale lighting calculations by using the smooth threshold function
color = 1.0 - aliasFactor * (1.0 - (halftoneColor + grayscaleColor)),
where aliasFactor is a number from 1.0 to 4.0 that influences the degree
of smoothing (antialiasing). To add dark edge lines to the ribbons and tubes,
the ProteinShader uses a combination of lines based on texture coordinates
and lines added to curved surfaces that are nearly perpendicular to the camera.
The intensity of edge lines is calculated using a smoothing function borrowed
from the single-pass wireframe technique of Baerentzen, Nielsen, Gjael, Larsen,
and Christensen [3].
The algorithms for generating three-dimensional tubes and ribbons suitable for
texture mapping are detailed in
ProteinShader: illustrative rendering of macromolecules
.
Briefly, the ProteinShader program uses a combination of Hermite interpolation
and SLERP (Spherical Linear intERPolation) to calculate a spline (a set of
piecewise cubic polynomial equations) and a set of Frenet frames (local
xyz-coordinate frames at discrete points along the spline). The tube or ribbon
is produced by sweeping a regular polygon along the spline, while aligning the
polygon to the xy-plane of each Frenet frame and connecting vertices between
polygons at successive positions along the spline. A repeating pattern of
texture coordinates is assigned to the vertices that define the surface of a
tube or ribbon, and these texture coordinates are then used to map
two-dimensional images onto the curved three-dimensional surfaces. The spline
used for generating tubes and ribbons runs precisely through the amino acid
alpha-carbons, so adding balls and sticks representations of the amino acid
side chains creates the appearance that the side chains are attached to the
tubes or ribbons (a spline aligned to the peptide bonds, rather than the
alpha-carbons, would not acheive this visual effect).
1.
Freudenberg B, Masuch M, Strothotte T:
Real-time halftoning: A primitive for non-photorealistic shading.
Proceedings of the 13th Eurographics workshop on rendering
2002, 227-231.
2.
Freudenberg B, Masuch M, Strothotte T:
Real-time halftoning: Fast and simple stylized shading.
In Game Programming Gems 4.
Charles River Media; 2004: 440-443.
http://wwwisg.cs.uni-magdeburg.de/graphik/pub/files/Freudenberg_2004_RTH.pdf,
retrieved April 2008.
3.
Baerentzen JA, Nielsen SL, Gjael M, Larsen BD, Christensen NJ:
Single-pass wireframe rendering.
SIGGRAPH Conference Sketches 2006.
http://www2.imm.dtu.dk/pubdb/views/publication_details.php?id=4884,
retrieved April 2008.