Commons:Featured picture candidates/Image:Molecular Modeling.png

Image:Molecular Modeling.png, featured

•  Info created, uploaded and nominated by Dhatfield. Source POV kindly provided by Ed Boas. A 3D render with good construction, lighting and texturing. -- Dhatfield (talk) 12:19, 19 June 2008 (UTC)
•  Support -- Dhatfield (talk) 12:19, 19 June 2008 (UTC)
•  Support cool! 09po (talk) 12:59, 19 June 2008 (UTC) Though not (yet) stricken, this is a suspect vote as it is this user's only contribution Lycaon (talk) 18:38, 19 June 2008 (UTC)
•  Comment More information is needed: what kind of molecule is it, and is the "purple cloud" representing the cloud of electrons or something else? --S23678 (talk) 12:57, 19 June 2008 (UTC)

• Good point,  Done. Dhatfield (talk) 13:31, 19 June 2008 (UTC)

•  Support Well done. --S23678 (talk) 13:49, 19 June 2008 (UTC)

•  Support--Mbz1 (talk) 13:27, 19 June 2008 (UTC)
•  Oppose Why not SVG? --libertad0 ॐ (talk) 14:03, 19 June 2008 (UTC)

• Why SVG? This raster is generated by 3D rendering - if changes are needed, they should be made to the source POV and it should be re-rendered. Converting the image to vector each time would not make it better. Dhatfield (talk) 16:34, 19 June 2008 (UTC)

•  Oppose I don't have any major technical complaints, but the render is so basic it just doesn't seem that impressive. – flamurai 16:55, 19 June 2008 (UTC)

• There's simple and there's elegant, but it's your call. Dhatfield (talk) 18:25, 19 June 2008 (UTC)

• Obviously, it's "my call". It's well executed, and better than auto renders, but what makes this stand out enough to justify it being featured as one of the best images on Commons? – flamurai 21:23, 19 June 2008 (UTC)

•  Oppose Lycaon (talk) 06:21, 20 June 2008 (UTC) As flamurai. We can hardly feature all of the hundreds of thousands of molecules that happen to be rendered (quite prettily) by some software. And if you must feature one, then why not something complicated (e.g. tetrodotoxin) or well-known (e.g. chlorophyll) instead of a simple dipeptide? Lycaon (talk) 18:35, 19 June 2008 (UTC)

• To clarify, this was not an automated render. This, this, this, this and this are automated renders. They are, to put it politely, ugly. As for subject matter, Commons does not allow upload of any 3D file formats so this is all I have to work with. Dhatfield (talk) 19:34, 19 June 2008 (UTC)
•  Question Could you enlighten us on the rendering process? Software? Source? Lycaon (talk) 19:45, 19 June 2008 (UTC)
•  Info Happily. Source: I got the source POV-ray (.pov) file from Ed Boas after seeing his image at WP:en FPC. The POV file was generated by molecular modeling software and this image was intended as a demonstration of the forces and interactions that are modeled. Presumably, that is why Ed chose a simple model. All of my works are marked as derivatives of the image he uploaded (which, technically, they are not), but I got the molecular skeleton from Ed - I don't know the attribution protocol in this case. Rendering process: A POV file is a text file analogous to a three dimensional SVG file that describes the camera and all objects & lights in the scene in 3D coordinates. However a 3D scene is significantly more complex than a vector image because 3D rendering uses the process of ray-tracing where objects can only be seen by their interaction with light that subsequently enters the camera. The scene is actually computed in reverse with 'vision rays' emanating from the camera - hence ray tracing. It's like photography in a vacuum. Objects have associated colour, texture (intensity and bump maps of any level of complexity), reflectance & shadow properties and can interact with lights by diffuse, specular, ambient and phong components. Lights have colour, brightness, orientation, axial and radial falloff, and their own parameters for how they interact with objects and create highlights and cast shadows. Edits: The original contained a construction error for the hydrophobic region which I fixed, I added an extra light to get the dual highlight (otherwise a point light source interacting with a sphere creates an unattractive and fake looking perfectly circular highlight) and shifted them off-center to the left, added another for top-right illumination, tuned the reflectance parameters of each object and changed the solid texture and shadow parameters. Editing was done in text and was not trivial. Software: I used POV-ray 3.61 (www.povray.org) a free, but tragically not libre program to render the scene. Overall: Is this the best that Commons has to offer in molecular models? I'm fairly sure it is. Of the first 250 of 1616 hits for 'molecule' and all 141 hits for 'molecular model' this and this are the only ones that come close and they don't come very close. As though we need more examples, here's another unrelated example of how to take a fantastic source and completely duff the render. Dhatfield (talk) 21:33, 19 June 2008 (UTC)

•  Support You convinced me. ;-). Lycaon (talk) 06:21, 20 June 2008 (UTC)
•  Neutral --.snoopy. 08:01, 23 June 2008 (UTC)

result: 5 support, 2 oppose, 1 neutral => featured. --Simonizer (talk) 15:24, 1 July 2008 (UTC)

•  Oppose Very nice, yes, but not outstanding. Crapload (talk) 00:54, 29 June 2008 (UTC)
•  Support --Reflection of Perfection (talk) 06:32, 30 June 2008 (UTC)