ANIMATION SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT

Baylor College Of Medicine, Houston TX

Investigators

Linked publications & trials

Abstract

This subproject is one of many research subprojects utilizing the resources provided by a Center grant funded by NIH/NCRR. The subproject and investigator (PI) may have received primary funding from another NIH source, and thus could be represented in other CRISP entries. The institution listed is for the Center, which is not necessarily the institution for the investigator. We have been working the field of 3D graphics for purposes of visualization and animation data in-terchange. Autodesk's FBX technology is one of the most widely used and supported platform-independent 3D graphics (e.g., polygons, NURBS) interchange solutions in the CAD and animation industry today. Planning is underway to create a high performance graphics bridge, between Chimera and Maya, the leading commercial animation package used in advanced biomedical animation (http://www.molecularmovies.org). A major and ongoing difficulty has been the transfer of 3D graphics, coordinate transformations, and camera positions cre-ated by one software program to a second software program, both of unrelated origins, to properly and identi-cally interpret the data;frequently this is not possible due to fundamental data format and design differences, which will be addressed in the HDF-VFS hyperspace. The creation and use of the FBX/HDF-VFS data bridge will allow NCMI to directly diagnose and correct for these problems, resulting in supported software that will be made available to the biomolecular communities. We believe the combination of high quality graphics, gener-ated by Chimera, directly exported into the leading animation software package Maya, will lead to the best an-imations possible;it should be noted that Harvard University's bio-molecular animation efforts by Gael McGill, et al, have adopted a similar strategy of using Maya, and we are coordinating with them for reasons of anima-tion module reusability and developing common skill sets. When such collaboration is worked out among these different academic developers, the resulting unified format will greatly benefit the cryo-EM and macromolecular investigators who are interested in producing "professional" animations from their structures at the least cost.