Orbital Viewer

Orbital Viewer is a lightweight software application that comes bundled with orbital drawing and viewing capabilities. Its purpose is to help you draw atoms and molecules, work with different types of rendering modes, generate animations, and check out the interior of the orbital.

Data can be imported from ORB or OV file format. When it comes to exporting the generated drawing, you can save it to ORB, OV, PPM, TIF, BMP, WRL or plain text file format.

You can enable the quick or precise rendering methods (points, polygons or ray traced mode), enter the number of points, alter the opacity and polygon density of the asymptote, tweak polygon options (e.g. positive and negative phase opacity, density, wireframe, points), as well as set up a series of parameters related to ray trace (e.g. probability opacity per step, surface opacity, index of refraction).

Orbital Viewer gives you the possibility to generate a custom number of atoms (each one with its own number of protons, mass and units), light the orbital from any location and cast shadow, rotate the light source with the view point, change the intensity and ambiance of the light source, as well as generate monoscopic, stereoscope, interlaced, red-blue, stereogram, overlay or chromadepth orbitals.

You can view the interior of the orbital using the cutaway feature, generate molecules using Linear Combination of Atomic Orbitals (LCAO) for all hybrid orbitals, create AVI files or sequences of TIF, PPM or BMP files, and set up camera parameters (enable a fixed image size, and enter details about the camera location).

What’s more, you are allowed to move the orbital to the left, right, up or down, rotate it to different angles, zoom in or out of the orbital, reset the position of the orbital, and set the default orbital.

Orbital Viewer enables you to alter the colors of background, positive phase, negative phase, asymptote, and other parameters, apply the color configuration settings to all windows, show error and warning messages, specify the point size (in pixels), adjust the zoom value, use emissive, ambient and diffuse color for VRML files, as well as make file associations.

Orbital Viewer proves to a reliable educational application that integrates a handy suite of features for helping you view and design orbitals. On the downside, the tool hasn’t been updated for a while, so you may encounter several errors while running it on newer operating systems. On Windows 8.1 Pro it crashed several times while we were trying to make several configuration settings.