Atomlll

The ATOMS program, written at Bell Telephone Laboratory, is capable of determining the visible portions of a scene consisting of interpenetrating spheres and cylinders, put together to represent “space-filling” or “ball-and-stick” molecular models. The Lawrence Livermore Laboratory version contains enhancements to add shading and highlights, and to render the spheres on film as ellipses, so they will appear round when projected in various wide-screen formats. The visible parts of each sphere or cylinder are shaded by a minicomputer controlling the film recorder, thus releasing the main computer from transferring the millions of intensity values for each frame. The minicomputer is microprogrammed with an efficient algorithm for the intensities, which uses the color look-up tables in the film recorder to store the reflectance as a function of angle of incidence.