Flying Edges - Faster Surfaces

General Discussion
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Last year I mentioned a speedup of >2x in calculating molecular orbitals.

@perminder-17 has been finishing up work on faster generation of surface meshes of all types using the new “Flying Edges” algorithm (instead of the older Marching Cubes technique).

I’m happy to report that the code yields ~2-2.2x speedup in mesh generation on a range of molecules, and even better has 6x fewer vertices (so also fewer triangles) for faster smoothing, rendering, less memory… etc.

Using the default “Automatic” resolution, I can generate a surface mesh for a DNA chunk (GATTACA, so ~450 atoms) in < 0.1s on my M1 MacBook.

I’m optimistic we’ll soon be able to do reasonable frame rates for molecular dynamics movies. (Right now, I’d guess ~8-10 fps.)

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@ghutchis I am extremely happy to hear that! I often find myself waiting for surfaces to render, so this is a huge improvement! Thanks a ton for the hard work!

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