OpenGL and P3D slow rendering

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Andrea

OpenGL and P3D slow rendering

in Programming Questions • 3 years ago

Dear all,
I am a physicist and in my research I am interested in visualize atoms and molecules positions coming out from my simulations. Typically chemists use graphical suits like VMD or XCrysDen based on OpenGL libraries, but I need more freedom so I decided to build my own 3D atoms/molecules visualization tool using Processing.
The problem is that I need to handle up to 5000 atoms (each one represented by a small sphere) and both with P3D and OPENGL the rendering is very slow. Do you know some option I can set to keep the rendering quality low so to speed up the visualization?
Thanks in advance.
Best Regards.
Andrea

Replies(5)

anchnk

Re: OpenGL and P3D slow rendering

3 years ago

Hi Andrea and Welcome,

I'm sure you're in the right place

Well, i've not much experience in OpenGL programming but from what i understood, when you need to handle large amount of objects you could use OpenGL Vertex Buffer Object or even go in shader programming which should speed up things if done right.

I saw a library couple of days ago (titlde glsl if i'm right) which let you programming shader and use them within processing.
Have a look at the processing wiki. There're some good examples about some "advanced" OpenGl programming.

But certainly someone with more experience will give you a better answer.
Was just trying to help.

Regards.
O.a

cedrickie..

Re: OpenGL and P3D slow rendering

3 years ago

he is talking about this library : http://codeanticode.wordpress.com/2010/08/22/glgraphics-0-9-4/

Andrea

Re: OpenGL and P3D slow rendering

3 years ago

Thanks a lot for your quick response!

amnon.owed

Re: OpenGL and P3D slow rendering

3 years ago

Also, don't forget about sphereDetail, which can come in handy.

andres

Re: OpenGL and P3D slow rendering

3 years ago

Just as a side note, GLGraphics comes with a little example to draw protein molecules, called PDBview. It uses the GLModel class to handle large geometries.

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