CrystalMaker Software
About
CrystalMaker is the most-efficient way to visualize crystal and molecular structures. Its interactive design lets you “see the wood for the trees” and build your own visual understanding of complex materials. CrystalMaker transcends traditional crystallography software, letting you create dynamical visualizations with rotatable animations. Energy-modelling tools let you design and relax new structures, predict their vibrational properties, and explore how they interface with other materials.
Integrated Structures Library
CrystalMaker includes an integrated structures library with some 1200 structures: annotated, indexed and with previews – ready for immediate display. The library includes over 400 minerals (all the major rock-forming minerals plus many more), as well as important inorganic and organic crystals and molecules: from buckyballs to zeolites, and from dental ceramics to high-Tc superconductors. Also included is a teaching library of crystal-chemical type structures, plus thematic libraries covering topics as diverse as chemical warfare, medicinal chemistry, food flavourings and more.
Feature
Some features of CrystalMaker software include:
- lets you import data from over 40 different formats.
- With CrystalMaker you can build any kind of crystal or molecular structure – quickly and easily.
- provides a wide range of model types, including traditional “ball-and-stick”, space-filling, polyhedral, wireframe and thermal ellipsoids.
- CrystalMaker features industry-leading 3D graphics, for spectacular – and fast – pixel-perfect visualizations with perfect overlap correction and translucency.
- Click-and-drag with the mouse, use the keyboard, or toolbar. View parallel to a vector or plane normal. Take advantage of multi-touch rotation and scaling with a trackpad, or use simple hand gestures in space, using a Leap Motion Controller.
- CrystalMaker is the first program of its kind to go beyond static structures, to let you explore structural behaviour quickly and easily. Just drag-and-drop files into the same window, then rearrange their thumbnails to build your movie timeline.
- CrystalMaker documents can save multiple structures, each with its own graphical thumbnail. Whilst an obvious application is for structural behaviour and animation, you can also save different views of the same structure, different model types, atom ranges, or related structures.
- lets you combine any number of 3D datasets with the current structure, each with its own visual settings.
- provides easy-to-use screen tools for measuring coordination environments – bond distances, angles, torsion angles – just by clicking with the mouse, or rolling over different atoms and bonds for real-time output.
- CrystalMaker features a powerful – and unique – energy-modelling engine that lets you turn crude, hand-drawn molecular structures into lowest-energy three-dimensional structures.
- Our mantra of letting you “see the wood for the trees” is particularly apposite when working with complex molecular crystals. Often there’s more to see than just the asymmetric unit – the packing for a start – and other programs struggle with fragmented molecules at the edges of the unit cell.
- lets you transform the unit cell, changing the lattice type, building a supercell, moving the origin, or applying an arbitrary matrix transformation.
- lets you print 3D models of your structures, via the STL 3D file export option (widely supported by most 3D printers).
- Diffraction patterns can be simulated for any displayed crystal structure, with just a single menu command – thanks to CrystalDiffract (powder diffraction) and SingleCrystal (X-ray, neutron and TEM single-crystal diffraction) programs.
Download
The current version for Windows and MacOSX operating systems can be downloaded from this link.
Citation
The preferred way to cite SingleCrystal software is:
- Inverting polar domains via electrical pulsing in metallic germanium telluride. DOI: 10.1038/ncomms15033.
- Ultrafast time resolved electron diffraction revealing the nonthermal dynamics of near UV photoexcitation induced amorphization in Ge2Sb2Te5. DOI: 10.1038/srep13530.
- Structure Formation of Ultrathin PEO Films at Solid Interfaces—Complex Pattern Formation by Dewetting and Crystallization.
DOI: 10.3390/ijms14023254. - Nanorod Self Assembly in High Jc YBa2Cu3O7−x Films with Ru Based Double Perovskites. DOI: 10.3390/ma4112042.