EXAMPLES

  quartz

  quatz rock

  soccerball

  pyrit

  amethyst rock

last update 18/1/2024  

WinXMorph™

 by Werner Kaminsky

 Research Associate Professor (2000-2020)
 Office (206) 543-7585  Lab (206) 543-0210
 kaminsky@chem.washington.edu

WinXMorph is a software program for creating realistic still or animated crystal shapes (morphologies) from crystallographic data (metric, (hkl) - Miller indices and central distances) as input and *.wrl (VRML V2.0 utf8) files as output, that can be inserted on web pages (see publications in J. Appl. Cryst. 2005 and J.Appl. Cryst. 2007)

Features summary of current version (1.56), published January 17th 2024:  

• Editing of Miller-indices, central distances, colors, transparency, animation

• Crystal point groups and icosahedral symmetry

• Full data import / export in *.mor and *.wrl formats

• Export of 3-D *.stl filed for three dimensional printing

• Limited data import / export in IUCr - *.cif format

• Simulation of crystal twinning

• Bravais-Friedel, Donnay-Harker model to predict morphologies

• Import of images for faces to simulate textures

• {hkl} or {hkil} indices mode, overline-listing of negative indices in model

• Angles, surface, volume calculations

• Crystallographic to/from physical reference transformation of indices

• Simulation of cleavage or crystal cuts

• Growth-sector drawing and projection to crystal cleavage planes

• VRML-File compression *.wrz, 

• Image export to file or clipboard as windows bitmap

• Quick-recall of most recent documents

• Full redo / undo / cancel capability for all actions

• 'New Model' feature

• Automatic update of newer versions at program start  (since 1/10/06)

• Detailed help manual

Windows 98/2000/NT/XP/VISTA/-7/-8/-10/-11, high-color capable video card, 20MB disk space

About WinXMorph and the author

Author of the program and this text is Werner Kaminsky. He had a research faculty position in the Department for Chemistry of the University of Washington (2000-2020), Seattle in Washington, USA. Born in Germany in 1959 going to school and after studying physics and then crystallography under Professor Siegfried Haussuehl, a PhD and a ‘Habilitation’ in  Cologne he moved first to Oxford to work at the Clarendon Laboratory in the Physical Crystallography Research Group of Professor Mike Glazer where he got a call to join Professor Bart Kahr in his research on dyed crystals and related phenomena. Half of the time is now spend in solving X-ray structures for the Department. The other half is dedicated to research and on rare occasions to projects like this: writing programs mainly for educational use. This is what Werner has to say about this program.

“This Program was started during my vacation over the holidays in Cologne, Germany, winter 2003/2004. As such, it did not waste salary or other funding while working on this program and I want to share my pleasure of writing and using WinXMorph with members of educational institutions and friends of crystal in generals.

My reason of writing a program to generate *.wrl files of crystal morphologies is simple: there are almost no such files on the internet (August.2004).  This will most likely change soon, and the beauty of crystal shapes will, so I hope, attract many.”