BlendMol: advanced macromolecular visualization in Blender

SUMMARY: Programs such as VMD and PyMOL are excellent tools for analyzing macromolecular structures, but they do not implement many of the advanced rendering techniques common in the film and video-game industries. In contrast, the open-source program Blender is a general-purpose tool for industry-standard rendering/visualization, but its user interface is poorly suited for rigorous scientific analysis. We present BlendMol, a Blender plugin that imports VMD or PyMOL scenes into Blender. BlendMol-generated images are well suited for use in manuscripts, outreach programs, websites and classes. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: BlendMol is available free of charge from http://durrantlab.com/blendmol/. It is written in Python. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.