Go Home 10 Feb 96

Simple examples of 3D crystal structures in VRML

First let's try a simple 3D cube with sphere.

(Click on the underlined text to see the 3D VRML images or click on the small images to see the full size images).

In WebSpace, try to mouse drag with Ctrl and/or Alt keys down to displace, rotate and zoom the 3D scene. Make it spin by letting go the mouse button before you finish dragging with the Alt key down. (If in WorldView you can't see the sphere, go immediately to the AlPO4 example).

The corresponding VRML file is simply: 

 

#VRML V1.0 ascii
Separator   {                               #start object
Material    { diffuseColor 0 0 1 }          #blue body
Cube        { }                             #draw cube
Translation { translation 2 0 0  }          #translate
Material    { diffuseColor 1 0 0            #red body              
              specularColor 1 1 1           #white hilights              
              shininess 0.1      }          #shiny (NB try 96.0 !!)
Sphere      { radius 1.5 }                  #draw sphere
            }                               #finish object
You can imagine how easy it is to construct crystal structures and examine them in 3D.

For example, let's try the BCC structure. To see the corresponding few lines of VRML source code, hold down the mousebutton instead of clicking to download the file (right mouse button with Unix.

Exploring ILL's gallery of 3D structures

These more complex structures were generated from crystallographic co-ordinate files using

xtal-3d, which can be made available for most Unix platforms as well as PC and Macintosh. (But if you are seriously interested in real time 3D graphics, you should probably purchase at least a base model SGI Indy-PC, which with academic discount costs little more than a Pentium-PC or PowerPC Mac.)

Let the show begin !

Don't forget to turn on the HEADLIGHT in the view menu if scenes are dark !!