Visualization of molecular properties at the qantum mechanical level using blender

Molecular visualization is an active and ever expanding subject of research. Most of the visualization methods are however applied on large biological molecules. The representation of smaller molecules on a quantum mechanical level is to date both cumbersome and rare. We present herein a workflow that allows arbitrary volumetric datasets obtained from quantum mechanical calculations to be visualized. Using the open source Blender software and in house developed scripts we show how a researcher might create high resolution publication ready images from quantum mechanical data, such as electron density, electrostatic potential or spin density. This approach currently beats standard molecular visualization tools such as VMD and PyMOL as it allows to visualize higher resolution volumetric datasets and hence, more complex molecules and molecular properties. Further we boast superior image quality due to the availability of high quality volumetric absorbtion, scattering and emission shaders in Blender. Finally we show how a today´s state of the art cloud platforms provide the computational power required to create high quality visual representions.