I want to visualize Patchy Particle simulation trajectory in OVITO. The trajectory file is written in .gsd format. In OVITO I am seeing the particles as spere with uniform color. But I want to see the particles as sphere and the patches on the sphere with some other color. How can I create this shape information and input this shape in OVITO?
I have assigned the physical information about the patches like their position on the sphere, interaction strength etc while making the trajectory file but can’t visualize them. Can anyone suggest some way to visualize them?
I am not familiar with patchy particle simulations and the workflow myself. But as far as I know, the GSD file format cannot describe local surface properties of the particles such as the surface color. It is best to ask in the GSD forum whether this possibility exists or not: glotzerlab/gsd · Discussions · GitHub
In OVITO, you have the option of loading a user-defined particle shape from a separate geometry file yourself - which may include local color information. You could thus prepare a colored, tessellated sphere (e.g. with the Blender software or with ParaView), export it as a triangular mesh and import it into OVITO as a user-defined particle shape. Note that the standard STL and OBJ formats do not currently support color information, only the Paraview VTK format does. Here you can find an example VTK file containing a simple tetrahedron with 4 differently colored sides: