Ambient occlusion and edge cueing to enhance real time molecular visualization

The paper presents a set of combined techniques to enhance the real-time visualization of simple or complex molecules (up to order of $10^6$ atoms) space fill mode. The proposed approach includes an innovative technique for efficient computation and storage of ambient occlusion terms, a small set of GPU accelerated procedural impostors for space-fill and ball-and-stick rendering, and novel edge-cueing techniques. As a result, the user's understanding of the three-dimensional structure under inspection is strongly increased (even for still images), while the rendering still occurs in real time.

The techniques shown in the above paper are implemented in the open source tool QuteMol freely available at qutemol.sourceforge.net

@Article\{TCM06,
  author       = "Tarini, Marco and Cignoni, Paolo and Montani, Claudio",
  title        = "Ambient occlusion and edge cueing to enhance real time molecular visualization",
  journal      = "IEEE Transaction on Visualization and Computer Graphics",
  number       = "6",
  volume       = "12",
  month        = "sep/oct",
  year         = "2006",
  url          = "http://vcg.isti.cnr.it/Publications/2006/TCM06"
}