Avogadro for Mac

Easily Create 3D Molecule Designs With This Software

Avogadro is a free and open-source graphic design software that acts as an advanced 3D molecule editor and visualizer for computational chemistry, molecular modeling, and other related fields of study. Written in C++, it’s designed for cross-platform use and has a flexible and high-quality rendering process to it that gives it an edge over other similar programs. This program is geared towards students, scientists, and researchers who can’t easily create 3D models of molecular compositions.

Molecule Madness

As a 3D molecular design editor, Avogadro aims to be easy to work with but also to be a producer of fast and flexible designs that look like they were constructed by graphic professionals. It has an intuitive user interface meant for beginners. Since Avogadro is an open-source project, it’s easy to install and all source code and documentation are available to be modified. It’s extensible and can be turned into a flexible plugin for developers. The rendering, interactive tools, commands, and Python scripts are all easy to work with, as well. Avogadro also features the ability to import chemical files, input generation for multiple computational chemistry packages, crystallography, and biomolecules from the Open Babel software, which is a chemical expert system for interconverting chemical file formats. This program is even diverse with its offered international languages. However, Avogadro comes with several hiccups. It’s prone to crashing and if you plan for a complex molecular design, you best be ready to keep saving your changes every minute or so. Being an open-sourced software, you will find tons of conflicting problems plaguing the program sometimes, as well. While it has fast rendering, it’s not optimized for scalability, larger chemical structures, and simulations. If you plan to try it out, you better save often.