An Image I made using krakatoa for a CG society challenge. I didn’t win but it was the first one I actually finished so feel good about that.
nice image!! what is autopack?
labs.autodesk.com/utilities/sciviz
From FAQ:
Q: What are AutoPack and CellPack?
A: autoPack is a tool for densely packing a volume with shapes of various sizes and dimensions. It’s the underlying technology behind cellPack, which combines the ability to encode biological ‘recipes’ with the close packing concepts to create visualizations of densely packed molecular spaces inside tools like Autodesk 3ds Max and Autodesk Maya.
Its an interesting bit of software,it has potential its in quite early stages and its very slow.
hmm. cant we do this with genome and or frost? bobo?
cb
Some of it, yes. Obviously the surface rendering you can do; we’ve done it here many times, we love Frost for that. CPK is also easy to do. The ball and stick model might be a bit more complex. Frost can handle ShapeIndex and Orientation and GeomTime, so I suppose it’s just a matter of setting those from Genome or a PRTSource. Ribbon and other backbone models would be hard, by the time you made the script that could pass the data to Genome, you might as well have made the model entirely.
The autopack it quite good for space filled and ribbon but becomes quite unwieldy for ball and stick models. The other issue is that it creates thousands of objects and max really starts to struggle with that. A lot of these are helper objects that dont seem useful.
We do ball and stick with single objects for each atom type. So for organic molecules you only end up with ~3-10 objects, and max is fine with that. I haven’t played with autopack though to see what it’s doing or why.
Autopack can pack any sized or shaped object, not just spheres. It’s like a rigid-body simulator without the time or forces. Without those constraints higher object counts can be packed than in a naive simulation.
Max does struggle with high object counts, but it’s much better than it used to be, so try the latest version of max that you can. Some mesh attachment operations are still highly inefficient so attaching many objects can take hours.