Lots of people like 3D and molecules and chemistry, just like me.
I used Ulead GIF Animator to make this 3D animation of a methane molecule. If you want to know how to make these kinds of animations in Ulead GIF Animator, here it is in a nutshell, with a digression or two.
A long time ago I found the best website about Chemistry.Chemweb.com I liked the site and they had a cool animated gif logo of the earth enclosed in a bucky ball. I emailed them and asked if I could use just the first frame in the logo as a link to their site. And they looked at the pages I wanted to put it on and said, heck yes. I had a little gif animation program so I could do it.
Chemweb page
ChemWeb has links to databases of skillions of PDB files. So I used them to find a PBD file recently for methane, and also for DNA, RNAase A, Insulin, Vitamin B12, Sucrose, Cholesterol, and Human PBP a long time ago, even before the dinosaurs.
I made all these molecular animations in .mov and GIF formats and some stills in PICT using a program,
Mac/PC Molecule,
which I bought around the same time I got a free licensed version of Photoshop version ONE, with the second scanner I ever bought. You young top guns probably can't remember that far back. (Flatbed scanners cost several thousand dollars back then. Yikes! And fast 1.4 million transistor CPUs were clocking in at 20 Mega Hertz)
Well, the Movie files were too big in bytes, and the gif animations had to be cropped, frame by frame in Photoshop. Which was a pain in the neck. Now Gary tells me these gif animations can be, "resampled," in the new versions of GIF Animator. That's nice. Believe me, that's really nice.
Molecular Animations
Anyway I posted all of these animations up, except for this Methane one. It has four frames. I just made it in Ulead GIF Animator which is the best gif animator program on my Windows machine. I made all the frames 170x170 pixels in Photshop. Then I rotated them in 90 degree increments. The resulting animation is not smoothe, nor does it rotate centrally around the carbon center. But the good part is that one can see the maximum reach of hydrogens at the corners of the (imaginary) tetrahedral structure. The first frame was set at 200/100sec. The other three frames were set at 100/100sec. Thus, the visualization of the SP hybrid molecular orbitals, represented here in the ball-and-stick convention, should be most pronounced. Obviously the hybrid orbitals are occupied by negatively charged pairs of electrons and since like charges repel, the orbitals and hence the hydrogen centers place themselves as far from each other as possible. That's why the animated gif was constructed in this way.
Anyone may right click on the gif and save it to disk and do with it what you will. If you would like to use the image as a link to the Buddycom.com section on Science, there is no need to follow the customary rules of netiquette and email such a proposal to it's creator.
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Buddycom Science
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Ooops! Just right clicked on the animation. In Netscape. It only worked in IE.
Dame Datta.
Well, I'll post it on the the methane pages. Or you can send email after all.
buddycom
buddy@gol.com
[This message was edited by buddycom on September 01, 2000 at 01:01 PM. [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_smile.gif[/img]
[This message was edited by buddycom on September 01, 2000 at 01:09 PM.]
[This message was edited by buddycom on September 03, 2000 at 03:35 PM.]
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