Impressive thing about Qutemol rendering with ambient occlusion is that this method is used in real time. I’ve put a small video showing a difference between typical rendering and Qutemol’s method (well, I hope it’s visible, quality of this video is pretty bad, but it’s my first file posted on YouTube).
The bad thing about Qutemol is that so far it works mostly only on the Windows OS (I’m not the last person having problems running it on the OSX). Linux users are out of luck – Qutemol needs hardware support for 3D rendering, so a virtual machine with Windows is not a solution.
Freelancing science 
Andrew Perry
October 27, 2007 at 07:16
I’d never tried Qutemol, but it looks pretty sweet (although it seems to do simple visualization only … options for interactive colouring and anaylsis are limited, from what I can see).
For the Qutemol forums, it looks like most of the hard work toward producing a native Linux version has been done already, it just hasn’t been cleaned up and made into a official alpha release. I found that the Windows version ran okay on Ubuntu Gutsy if I used Cedega (a version of Wine that has better DirectX support … you can compile your own Cedega if you are cash-strapped). See my blog for a screenshot :).
As far as other alternatives for high quality molecular images: I noticed that other day that you can get similar results from VMD by exporting and rendering with Tachyon, but it’s not realtime rendering like Qutemol. Digging around on the VMD site, I also noticed that future versions will probably support ambient occlusion rendering through Nvidia’s Gelato (mmmmmm, gelato). I couldn’t get Gelato to run on Ubuntu Gutsy (amd64) though, so I haven’t been able to test it, but having powerful analysis AND better eye candy in the one package will be nice.
freesci
October 27, 2007 at 08:25
Andrew, thanks for the comment and your tip with Cedega.
I know that Qutemol has a linux version in the CVS that should compile and work. However it requires almost exact version of external libraries, so it’s very distribution-specific solution. You can install them anyway (I did). But on my machine (Dapper) it still doesn’t compile. I got impression it is something messed with 3D rendering libraries, but I’m not a programmer…
I did also try VMD/Tachyon combination and so far results are not as good as Qutemol’s. But I was expecting that seeing screenshots of this new feature on the VMD webpage (the bigger protein the shape perception is getting worse). I hope it’ll get better when final version is released, but honestly I will still use VMD even without AO support. 🙂
While probably ambient occlusion will not beat hardware stereo rendering soon, I hope it will make its way into scientific papers: I’m blind to stereo images 🙂