pmUE (Protein Modelling Unreal Engine) - a repo for constructing a molecule visualizer plugin in Unreal
Currently in the process of finishing up my thesis, so development will pick up later this year. In the meantime, feel free to contribute as always.
The current capabilities are shown below for Methane.pdb and AceticAcid.pdb respectively. Appropriate bonds and bond lengths must still be implemented.
- Unreal Engine 4 (mainly in C++) used alongside Visual Studio 2019 for the majority of the work, with Doxygen-style commenting (html file will be added in a docs folder)
- pmUE will be more akin to an Unreal plugin than a standalone "game"
- If larger molecules will significantly slow down the viewer, then Nanite will be used.
How atoms are connected will likely be modelled using graph theory. However, UE4 makes this difficult, as having an array within an array is not supported. Hence, a more inefficient, yet functional approach is needed. The best way to do this to my current knowledge is by constructing an array of indices for each atom, containing the indexes of the atoms they are connected to.
To my knowledge, I am the only individual working on this repo. As the code is slowly being developed, it is recommended to open your own branch if you'd like to add anything to the project. All contributions welcome!
If you use any of the code listed here (or the entire plugin) please say so in the acknowledgements section of your published media (e.g. journal, article, video, etc.).
A good template: "The molecular visualization was performed using pmUE (https://github.com/ISDementyev/pmUE)".
Of course, you may write this in whatever language is required for you to write in.
Avogadro 1.2.0 was used for the creation of some models in PDBFiles
- Avogadro: an open-source molecular builder and visualization tool. Version 1.XX. http://avogadro.cc/
- Marcus D Hanwell, Donald E Curtis, David C Lonie, Tim Vandermeersch, Eva Zurek and Geoffrey R Hutchison; “Avogadro: An advanced semantic chemical editor, visualization, and analysis platform” Journal of Cheminformatics 2012, 4:17.