A paper by Joseph R. Weber from the BMC Structural Biology publication is online, which gives a good case-study in the effectiveness of the ProteinShader application in biomedical visualization of molecular proteins.
The ProteinShader program, a new tool for macromolecular visualization, uses information from Protein Data Bank files to produce illustrative renderings of proteins that approximate what an artist might create by hand using pen and ink. A combination of Hermite and spherical linear interpolation is used to draw smooth, gradually rotating three-dimensional tubes and ribbons with a repeating pattern of texture coordinates, which allows the application of texture mapping, real-time halftoning, and smooth edge lines.
via Abstract | ProteinShader: illustrative rendering of macromolecules.
