BlendMol: advanced macromolecular visualization in Blender

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.