Visual Molecular Dynamics

Molecular scenes can be exported to external rendering tools such as POV-Ray, RenderMan, Tachyon, Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML), and many others.

[4] VMD has been developed under the aegis of principal investigator Klaus Schulten in the Theoretical and Computational Biophysics group at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.

The initial version of VMD was written by William Humphrey, Andrew Dalke, Ken Hamer, Jon Leech, and James Phillips.

[10] In 2001, Justin Gullingsrud, and Paul Grayson, and John Stone added support for haptic feedback devices and further developing the interface between VMD and NAMD for performing interactive molecular dynamics simulations.

[11][12] In subsequent developments, Jordi Cohen, Gullingsrud, and Stone entirely rewrote the graphical user interfaces, added built-in support for display and processing of volumetric data,[13] and the use of OpenGL Shading Language.

VMD visualization of a 1-billion atom aerosolized SARS-CoV-2 virion, rendered with Tachyon on a workstation with 1TB RAM.
Satellite tobacco mosaic virus molecular graphics produced in VMD and rendered using Tachyon . The scene is shown with a combination molecular surfaces colored by a radial distance, and nucleic acids shown in ribbon representations. The Tachyon rendering uses both direct lighting and ambient occlusion lighting to improve the visibility of pockets and cavities. The VMD axes are shown as a simple example of rendering of non-molecular geometry.