allknowingroger/molecularnodes

Addon and nodes for working with structural biology and molecular data in Blender.

Molecular Nodes 🧬🔬💻

Buy Me a Coffee to Keep Development Going!

Join a Community of Blender SciVis People!

What is Molecular Nodes?

Molecular Nodes provides a convenient method for importing structural biology files into Blender, and several nodes for working with atomic data inside of Blender's Geometry Nodes.

Blender's Geometry Nodes provides a powerful interface for procedural modelling and animation. Currently it is limited in its ability to read any kind of structured data file as input, that isn't a 3D mesh. Molecular Nodes bridges this gap by providing an interface for converting .pdb and other file types into meshes that are usable by Geometry Nodes.

Acknowledgements

This addon is built crucially around the python library atomium, which provides a great lightweight and pure-python way to to parse a variety of structural biology files, that interface nicely with the built-in python interpreter that is bundled with Blender.

The molecular dynamics trajectrory import is enabled by the MDAnalysis package.

This addon is built using the excellent plugin for creating addons Serpens, which made the process of compiling a clear and concise addon, significantly reducing development time an creating a better addon overall.

Importantly none of this would be possible without the Blender and the Blender Foundation and the fantastic work of all the developers, from the community and the foundation itself.

This documentation is currently not complete for all of the nodes, but there should be enough to get you started. More complete documentation is in the works.

Installation

Please see the installation page of the documentation on how to install Molecular Nodes in Blender, and the examples page on how to get started.

You can also watch the tutorial series on youtube on how to use Molecular Nodes.