Add Clipping Plane

- The clipping plane cuts the 3D visualization into two areas, everything left of the plane will not get rendered anymore. The clipping plane is stored as a standard document that can be manipulated (moved around, rotated, visibility on/off, etc.) like any other document. To facilitate the positioning of the clipplane a semi-transparent rectangle is drawn on top of the plane. The rendering of the rectangle can be turned off in the property dialog of the clipplane document.

Save Screenshot

- Saves the content of the 3D window as a jpg or png file to disk. Please make sure that the 3D window is not occluded by any other window or dialog box.

Export as Wavefront OBJ file

Saves the 3D visualization as alias wavefront obj file. The file format is supported by most 3D rendering packages, which can be utilized to create high-quality images. The format does not support all features of the opengl rendering shown in the interactive 3D window, the direct volume rendering is an example of a Sculptor rendering which cannot be exported using the alias wavefront format.

The following image was exported from Sculptor and rendered with the free 3D modeling package Blender:

Change Background Color

Opens a color chooser dialog with which one can set a new background color.

Zoom In / Zoom Out

- Scales the entire Sculptor scene.

Center Mode

If center mode is enabled, the rotations are applied around the center of the document (this is the default). If the mode is disabled the rotations are relative to the mouse point (or the coordinate of the input device, tracking device, etc).

Orthographic Projection

- Switches between perspective projection (default) and orthographic projection. The following example shows the same system first in perspective projection and then in orthographic projection:

Show 3D Coordinate System

Turns the coordinate system on or off.

Show 3D Cursor

Turns the 3D cursor on or off.

High Contrast Palette

The coloring of the molecular structures is based on a standard palette - properties of the structure, for example the b-factor, chain ID, etc., are mapped to a color using a palette.

With the menu item one can switch between a high and low contrast palette. If the high contrast palette is selected, adjacent values are mapped onto very different colors, whereas the low color palette changes smoothly over the range of the values.

The following two dialog-boxes show the same region of the high-contrast and low-contrast palette:

Closed Surfaces at Clip-Planes

This menu item can be used to close the borders of surfaces at clip-planes (default: off):