3D molecular structure imaging software - can anyone help

[Cyberus]

Hi guys.
I was wondering if any of the chemists or perhaps physicists (glancing towards Kenny and Blobrana) know of any [preferably] free programs to generate a 3D molecular structure model for compounds [you know the ball and stick type ones].
It wouldn't have to be anything too fancy, but it would need to be user friendly [and bear in mind I'm a physicist, not a chemist]. And generate nice-looking images that can be freely used/distributed

Can anyone help?

T'would be much appreciated

Cheers

 :-)

[dezignersrepublic]

Would this do??

There's also this.


Both are freeware.

[Cyberus]

That's really helpful mate, thanks. I wouldn't have known where to look.

Now I just need to find out if I can use the output freely - i.e. images are not copyrighted or anything

[that_punk_guy]

I managed to crash Biodesigner pretty easily.

[KennyR]

When I was at uni I used a nice online java-based thing to build molecules for pasting into my project. I've long since lost the URL though, and 45 min of googling and searching through stacks of dusty uni stuff didn't help. :-(

[Cymric]

VMD looks like a nice program, but I wonder if there are truly chemists out there who use it except for making beautiful pictures to impress other people with. It sounds very cynical, but the molecules used to show off VMD are so hideously complex you probably couldn't even spot major changes in their internal structure.

[Karlos]

I think the examples are just to show of the power of the application. You don't have to load enzyme structures into it.

Going back a bit...

There was a nice and easy application for MacOS you can use comfortably under shapeshifter. Chem3D I think it was called and was designed to work alongside ChemDraw (used for skeletal structure drawing etc.) but ran happily as a stand alone.

I used my amiga to run shapeshifter for many such apps that I needed at the time. It could import a bunch of standard structure formats and had various visualisation options (including output to eps for printing, which was handy) and could do some basic operations including conformational energy minimisation - provided you have the patience to wait for it ;-)

[bloodline]

I used to used Chemoffice (I think it was called that), which included a molecular drawing program (probably ChemDraw) and also had extentions for M$ Word, that made putting the images (and tweaking them) in word really easy!

[Karlos]

Yep ChemDraw worked fine alongside MS Orifice. It used OLE (IIRC) so you could just plonk a drawing into your document and double click to edit it in chemdraw.

[blobrana]

Hum,
I suppose i`d better say PovChem

(Used with pov-ray of course)