Molecular Surface Viewer Home Page

MSV is an OpenGL based viewer for molecular surfaces computed with MSMS. It is freely available for several architectures (SGI, Dec-Alpha).

This is the main window which appears when the program is started.

This example illustrates the following functionalities:

MSMS surfaces: solvent excluded surface of a small protein (CRAMBIN).
Geometric Primitives: Cone, Sphere, Torus.
Arbitrary Clipping Planes: red clipping plane used to clip the sphere.
FrontAndBack object properties: The Front facing polygons of the sphere are Gouraud shaded and have a different color than the back facing polygons which are simply outlined.
Two directional Lights are displayed (white and blue lines).
Fog of the same color as the background.
The Scene is anti-aliased.

The main features of MSV are:
- Full implementation of the OpenGL Lighting model. 8 independent light sources which can be directional, positional or spot lights.
- Built in set of geometric primitives, such as sphere, cone, box, torus, icosahedron, etc...
- Fancy color editor with WISIWIG mode
- Simple material editor
- Six arbitrary clipping planes
- Atmospheric condition simulation (Fog, Haze, Smog)
- Programmable mouse buttons
- Orthographic and perspective projection
- Scene anti-aliasing
- Depth-of-field effect
- Editable fog and background color
- Polygon culling
- MSMS surfaces visualization
- Save and restore scene capability
- Simple VRML browsing capabilities
The main MISSING features are:
- Texture mapping
- Transparency
- Interpreted command language
Manual | Get MSV |

Michel Sanner
April 1997
sanner@scripps.edu