ChimeraX docs icon

VTK PolyData Details

The VTK exporter in Chimera and ChimeraX (used by the ChimeraX save command) was contributed by Shawn Waldon as part of the SketchBio project in 2013. It exports molecular structures and surfaces, not density maps, to an ascii legacy VTK file format [documentation PDF]. The models are not clipped. For molecular structures, it exports points and lines for the atoms and bonds, and for surfaces it exports a mesh. At each point (atoms and surface), it exports attributes of the associated atom: modelNum, atomNum, resType, resNum, atomType, bFactor, occupancy, and chainPosition.


UCSF Resource for Biocomputing, Visualization, and Informatics / February 2024