Mollecular Modelling and 3D Printing

This can be 3D-printed to get a cool something....

The process used:

1. Open the .pdb file in Pymol (opensource, free if you install yourself).
2. The molecule will appear.
3. To the right of the molecule, click on the "S" then the "As" then "surface" (this calls the "show as surface" command, which hides everything but the surface; it's important to hide everything else since unwanted artifacts may be present and screw up the 3D printing later on...)
4. Again, to the right of the molecule, click on the "C" then the "by element" then the 3rd "CHNOS...." from the end. This sets the color scheme.
   
5. Use the menu bar to set maximum display quality:
   Display / Quality / Maximum Quality
6. Finally, from the main menu, save as VRML2:
   File / Save Image as / VRML 2...
7. Optionally, in case of slow Internet upload speeds, zip compress the resulting .wrl file before uploading to Shapeways.

If you need other formats, e.g. STL :

1. Open the previously generated .wrl file in MeshLab using the menu:
   File / Import Mesh
2. Save a copy in the format of your choice using the menu:
   File / Export Mesh
3. Again, optionally compress to save space and upload time.