Molecular Renderer is a minimal renderer for molecular nanotechnology. It does not have UI features like buttons and dropdowns; instead, the user codes the structures and trajectories to render. This design provides more flexibility and reduces the complexity to code a CAD program.
Until 2024, NanoEngineer was the most capable platform for designing molecular nanotechnology. It had an interactive UI, but also simulators that ran slowly at >5000 atoms. This restricted the design to colorful strained shell structures in order to minimize atom count. Several projects sought to improve on this aspect—the difficulty performing iterative design on nanomachines.
The most well-funded projects (Atomic Machines, CBN Nano Technologies) are closed-source. As a result, aspiring engineers had to rely on the 15-year old NanoEngineer. The successor needed to follow a more modern approach than close-sourcing:
...for a molecular nanotechnology industry to exist, there must be such a society of engineers that transcends any single company, and a public body of knowledge capturing best practices for nano-mechanical engineering design. Other companies are training engineers on in-house tools where they create designs never to be seen by the outside world. We believe strongly that needs to change...
Out of all the ongoing efforts to succeed NanoEngineer, Molecular Renderer was the first to reach million-atom scale. It was built from the ground up to enable engineering of massive systems. The scale of general-purpose computers, replicating machines, and medical nanobots.
Working on porting the renderer to Windows. Will add usage instructions when it is finished.