LSB has over 20 years of experience in creating animated portrayals of
abstract and time-varying phenomena.
Most of the animations portray processes that were investigated using
state-of-the-art ab initio or semi-empirical molecular computations
for quantum and quasi-classical models.
The LSB Animation Engine is a proprietary animation driver, coupled with the
POV-Ray image-rendering suite.
The pairing produces a faithful representation of the data under investigation.
Moreover, the images may be rendered at arbitrarily large formats.
Other animations portray innovative application of other, more widely
known mathematical methods.
The use of animations can distill the results of many hundreds - or even many
thousands - of hours of supercomputer calculations to a presentation that
is readily understood by researchers, students, administrators, funding
officers, and the general public.
LSB welcomes inquiries regarding the design of media for the visual
portrayal of abstract phenomena for educational or research purposes.
This short animation shows how visual cues and motion create
the illusion of a three-dimensional object.
This long video clip is an example of the use of animation to
portray the results of a very large computational scientific problem.
Specifically, it illustrates the intermediate stepwise results of a
molecular modeling computation of the simulated annealing of
the Closed Conformer Switch in ncd as T ranges from 0K to
800K and then back to 300K.
Most of this video shows only the structure of the Switch.
When the Switch attains a magenta color, this represents the
configuration at 300K, i.e., the start of the process.
The successive colors represent the heating from 300K to 800K,
and the maximal 800K temperature is represented by a bright
yellow color.
After the Switch cools back to 300K (shown again in the magenta color),
the original configuration of the Switch is again shown in
light gray for comparison to the new configuration.
Finally, as the original Switch is faded out, the entire molecule
is shown in its final structure.
(Note: This trailer has been reduced in dimension and quality
in the interest of bandwidth requirements.)
For information about this calculation, see:
Todd J. Minehardt, Roger Cooke, Edward Pate, and Peter Kollman,
A molecular dynamics study of the energetic, mechanistic, and
structural implications of a closed phosphate tube in ncd,
Biophys. J. 80, 1151-1168 (2001).
Many of our scientific animations were produced under the moniker
"Austin Molecule Works", and a number of clips that are
intended for educational purposes are available at an
archival website.
Since this material was created in 1999 and before, many of the
original video clips are rendered in obsolete video file formats,
and are incompatible with modern web browsers.
This material has been copied to this site, and the file formats
and naming conventions of the animations have been upgraded to conform to
modern browser standards for video presentations.