About MCell and DReAMM

MCell

MCell is a General Monte Carlo Simulator of Microcellular Physiology, and simulations can easily include hundreds of polygon mesh surfaces, sometimes containing millions of triangles, and thousands to millions of diffusing or stationary molecules.

DReAMM

DReAMM is a visualization and analysis program designed to read MCell visualization output of virtually unlimited size, and then let you choose what to render and with what level of detail. The most important advantage of DReAMM's design is fast interactive flexibility. This requires a large amount of RAM for anything but the simplest MCell models (refer to System Requirements and the DReAMM User's Guide for further details).

Visualizing Large Models

By default, newly imported data is not rendered until selected, which avoids memory overruns and other difficulties incurred by very large models. In addition , the default rendering properties assigned to newly chosen objects are designed to minimize memory use and computational load. Finally, you can also "clip" imported data, so that only a specified portion is rendered.

DReAMM Projects and Customizations

Imported MCell visualization data and associated DReAMM settings (selected objects, clipping, camera and animation, lighting, shading, and so forth) constitute a DReAMM project, which can be saved in a project configuration file for subsequent reuse. While working with a DReAMM project, you can customize hundreds of rendering and animation settings, which can be saved in separate customization files. These files can subsequently be shared between different DReAMM projects, and so, for example, a complex camera trajectory might be reused for multiple animations, or a complex set of surface coloring and shading properties might be reused for multiple models.