The fact that a membrane is handled and presented 3-dimensionally establishes room for options.
First of all, you can customize the appearance, activate some helpers and change your point of view.
Another important feature is the detail settings, which do not only take effect on visuals, but play a major role in the precision of geometric calculations.
The camera in the Membrane View can also be operated by using the mouse.
Here are some controls:
Rotate | Hold down the left mouse button while
moving the mouse in any direction. Rotating is only allowed while in Free-Look mode. |
Zoom | Hold down the middle mouse button and move your mouse up/down to change the zoom level |
Translate | Holding down the right mouse button while
moving the mouse will translate your camera |
The camera is always set to one of 3 possible modes which can be activated
in the lower toolbar.
The two buttons on the right will move the camera to a top view on the membrane, either from the extracellular or from the intracellular side. You cannot rotate the camera in these two modes.
To rotate the camera you will have to activate the Free-Look mode (left button).
The Membrane View shows 2 different helpers concerning the coordinate system which can be toggled on/off in the upper toolbar:
Displays the bars of your coordinate system.
The measurement are in anstrom values.
Displays a grid on the X/Z plane of your
boundaries. Each mesh measures 10 anstrom in width/height.
The MembraneEditor offers 5 different display modes which can be changed in the upper toolbar. The different atomic display modes are well-known by the usual PDB viewers.
Due to the large amount of atoms that have
to be rendered in a usual membrane, atomic display modes will slow down the performance
significantly! DO NOT use this feature unless your
membrane is fairly small, contains only few objects or you own a really fast computer and graphic card.
If you only want to preview your membrane, use the more efficient preview function.
All settings regarding the 3D view are located inside menus which can accessed
by the 'Open 3D Settings' item either from
the toolbar or the program's menubar. It inherits 3 menus, Appearance, Geometric
Detail and Controls.
You can use the 'Default' button in order to reset the current menu to default values.
For more information about the settings, read the next page