Adaptive on-the-fly molecular ribbons generation

Abstract

Molecular dynamics simulations are of key importance in the drug design field. One common used representation to visualize these simulations is the Ribbons representation, which gives to the expert a good overview of the conformation of the molecule. Although there are several techniques to visualize this representation, all of them have limitations –in terms of space or calculation time, making them not suitable to a real-time interaction with simulation software. In this paper we present a novel adaptive algorithm that generates in real time, using the tessellation shader, the ribbon representation of a molecule without any pre-process.