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last update 08/01/2008  

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by Werner Kaminsky

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

WinXMorph is a free-for-educational-use program for Windows 2000, XP (see requirements) with which realistic still or animated crystal shapes (morphologies) are created 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 the publications in J. Appl. Cryst. 2005 and J.Appl. Cryst. 2007)

Features summary of current version (1.4.95), published February/2007:  

go to download here

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

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

• VRML-File compression *.wrz, 

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

• 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

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

• Crystal point groups and icosahedral symmetry

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

• Import of images for faces to simulate textures

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

• 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

• Detailed help manual

• Free license for educational use

VRML-Examples

quartz

quartz-handpiece

rosequartz

smokyquartz

amethyst-handpiece

K2SO4 dyed with Trypan Blue

pyrit{001}

pyrit{210}

pyrit-handpiece

Truncated Icosahedron

best viewed with R98 Renderer

WinXMorph

Windows 95/98/2000/NT/XP/Vista (2000/NT/XP recommended,Vista), high-color capable video card 16MB disk space

Apply for the Full-Version License (free of charge for single academic users) to receive a password for enabling export routines and tools transforming the Demo into a Full-Version

Tutorial on how to add virtual reality to a PowerPoint presentation

Below an example screenshot

About WinXMorph and the author

Author of the program and this text is Werner Kaminsky. He has a research faculty position in the Department for Chemistry of the University of Washington, 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.”