Blog
Guides, release notes and teaching ideas from the ChemIllusion team: chemical drawing, organic chemistry courses, open textbooks, homework and AI tools for chemistry.
Blog
Teaching our course tutor when to hint, when to push and when to explain
November 11, 2026
We tested the ChemIllusion course tutor against a plain chat assistant on 50 organic chemistry tutoring moments. The tutor chose the right teaching move far more often and gave away far fewer answers. Here is the prompt it now runs on, and what the test can and cannot tell you.
Read moreConvert reaction mechanisms into accurate 3D movies
November 6, 2026
In the Mechanism Lab, curved-arrow mechanisms play as 3D animations so students can align a flat line drawing with what the atoms actually do. Draw a mechanism with the Lab tools, read one from a photo or manuscript, or rebuild a library example step by step while the engine checks your arrows.
Read moreCreate conformational analysis videos that help students bridge 2D and 3D representations
October 29, 2026
Four 3D-native conformation videos rendered from the molecule on your canvas: a Newman rotation with its energy curve, the double Newman of a chair, the 1,3-diaxial figure, and the full chair flip through the boat, each with a transcript and MP4, GIF and poster downloads.
Read moreFrom XYZ Coordinates to a Metal Complex You Can Teach With
October 18, 2026
Paste the coordinates of a transition-metal complex and ChemIllusion proposes the bonding, the ligand charges, and the metal's oxidation state, with dative-bond SMILES you can copy. It is free, needs no account, and never sends your structure to an AI model. Built on the open-source xyz2mol_tm method from Jan Jensen's group.
Read moreChemistry Visual Intelligence: Anchored Effects, Scientific Maps, and Scene Reconstruction
October 17, 2026
When you build a figure for a lecture slide, a problem set, or a graphical abstract, the visual cues are part of the chemistry. ChemIllusion's Chemistry Visual Intelligence update brings deterministic, structure-aware visual treatments directly into the Generator workspace: anchored effects, multi-molecule property comparison maps, 2D-to-3D CineMol color transfer, editable SAM-based scene reconstruction, and crisp vector exports across SVG, PDF, Word, and PowerPoint.
Read moreChemIllusion Can't Fix Cheating, but It Can Help
October 6, 2026
No technology can create academic honesty. That takes an instructor's whole approach to teaching, assessment, and classroom culture. ChemIllusion now has tools for in-class and out-of-class assessments that include photographing a model kit, drawing a structure in the air with their hands, or naming the molecule aloud. All with real-time feedback. This post covers what the tools do, what they do not do, and where they fit in a larger strategy of engaging students and keeping them honest.
Read moreHow Jev Powers Chem Autocomplete
September 25, 2026
Chem Autocomplete suggests the next structure while you draw. RDKit builds and checks every candidate from your drawing, and Jev, a decision model from TypeSafe, picks which of those checked cards to show and in what order, in one request of about 0.2 seconds.
Read moreHow a Codebase Learns Chemistry
September 20, 2026
AI makes chemistry mistakes. ChemIllusion turns those failures into tests, reusable functions, and agent skills so each new feature starts from a better chemistry foundation — told through the commit and line-of-code history of this codebase.
Read moreA Reduction and a Dipeptide Through the ChemIllusion ELN
September 7, 2026
A walkthrough of the ChemIllusion lab notebook with two examples. A sodium borohydride reduction shows the record itself: scheme, hands-free notes, checks and write-up. A dipeptide, L-alanyl-L-alanine, shows the chemistry tools: processing its ¹H NMR, asking the Structure Solver what it is, and predicting the mechanism of its hydrolysis.
Read moreUpdating a Course Shouldn't Mean Starting Over
August 17, 2026
Most instructors begin a course update with history, not a blank page. CourseHouse's LMS course review inventories an exported course, flags duplicates and stale links, and helps you make the smallest useful set of changes before you re-import.
Read moreAn Organic Chemistry Text Teachers and Students can tune.
August 1, 2026
Our openly licensed organic chemistry textbook is now generally available. Readers set how much detail they get and how every structure is drawn; instructors set what the course carries. Here is what adjusts, and the licensing and AI policies that come with it.
Read moreHow We Use Remotion — and How We Keep the Chemistry Accurate
July 19, 2026
ChemIllusion builds structure-drawing videos, reaction-path clips, and energy-diagram animations with Remotion. Here's why we chose a React composition engine — and how we keep molecules, mechanisms, and teaching claims honest.
Read morePrivate Structure Mode, and Why We're Building a Free, Self-Hostable Chemistry Harness
July 6, 2026
Researcher accounts can now turn on Private Structure Mode — ZDR-routed AI requests and no default retention of chemical structures. It's also the first step toward a bigger goal: OpenMolClaw, a free, open-source, self-hostable chemistry agent harness, coming soon from the ChemIllusion team.
Read moreTwo Ways to Teach Hybridization: Classic Diagrams and Misconception-Resistant Occupancy Boxes
June 29, 2026
The Orbital & Hybridization tool on the ChemIllusion Generator now offers a classic textbook-style energy diagram and an electron-occupancy box view, with an in-app teacher modal that explains four common student misconceptions and links to peer-reviewed citations.
Read moreChemIllusion Study Tools for Moodle: Bringing Open Chemistry Learning Tools into the LMS
June 25, 2026
ChemIllusion Study Tools for Moodle is now public on GitHub, bringing open-source, privacy-aware molecule tools, chemistry diagrams, study decks, and accessible flashcards directly into Moodle.
Read more3D Renders from QM Output Files: The xyzrender Tool
June 17, 2026
You ran the calculation. Now make it look like a paper figure. ChemIllusion's 3D / QM Render tool uses xyzrender to turn XYZ coordinates, SDF, MOL, and PDB files into publication-quality molecular graphics in seconds — no separate visualization pipeline required.
Read moreCPK Models, Molecular Shape, and the CineMol 3D Tool
June 17, 2026
Corey, Pauling, and Koltun gave chemistry space-filling models that changed how scientists see molecular shape. ChemIllusion's CineMol 3D tool brings that same intuition into fast, editable digital teaching visuals — and every render ships with built-in alt text for accessible export to slides and handouts.
Read moreNewman Projections on the ChemIllusion Canvas
June 15, 2026
The Newman projection tool lets organic chemistry students and teachers add editable conformational-analysis diagrams to the ChemIllusion canvas, pick butane presets, and change substituent labels without redrawing the figure.
Read moreReal Thermochemistry in Reaction Coordinate Diagrams
June 15, 2026
ChemIllusion now overlays curated experimental ΔH values from the NIST Chemistry WebBook on reaction coordinate diagrams for canonical Organic Chemistry 1 reactions — so the product well depth reflects real thermochemistry, not an arbitrary sketch.
Read moreMaking Chemistry More Accessible
May 27, 2026
ChemIllusion is building accessibility tools for chemistry that read structures, reduce visual overload, support keyboard-friendly workflows, and give students multiple ways to work with molecules.
Read moreFrom One Structure to Five Variants in Seconds: Inside the Fragment Editor
May 20, 2026
The Fragment Editor lets you edit any region of a molecule directly or spin up IUPAC-named variants without redrawing anything. Here is how it works, using serotonin as the example.
Read moreThe Generator Chat Just Got a Lot Smarter to Navigate
May 20, 2026
ChemIllusion's generator chat now shows a context-aware skill chip ribbon that surfaces the right actions for what is on your canvas—no more hunting through menus or remembering which skill does what.
Read moreKimi and DeepSeek Are Now in ChemIllusion — Here Is the Benchmark Data
May 20, 2026
ChemIllusion now supports Kimi K2.5 and DeepSeek V3.2 via NVIDIA NIM. We ran both through our open LLM-SMARTS Arena chemistry benchmark before adding them — here are the scores and what they mean for your workflows.
Read moreProteins Meet Ligands: BindingDB in the Generator
May 11, 2026
ChemIllusion now connects the small-molecule you draw with BindingDB-backed protein targets, optional AlphaFold models, and a clearer Protein Structure Viewer so medicinal chemistry and teaching workflows stay on one canvas.
Read moreA Chemical Drawing Tool that Reinforces Organic Chemistry
April 29, 2026
ChemIllusion Drawing Coach turns molecular drawing from a UI survival test into guided organic chemistry practice with real-time feedback, lesson links, and teacher-ready curriculum tools.
Read moreSpeak Molecule Is Now on the Main Generator Page
April 21, 2026
The Speak Molecule tool now lives directly on the main ChemIllusion generator page, making pronunciation support easier to use during drawing, learning, and accessible chemistry workflows.
Read moreWhy We Added Claude Opus 4.7 to ChemIllusion So Quickly
April 20, 2026
We integrated Claude Opus 4.7 within days because early benchmark evidence showed meaningful gains for chemistry string reasoning, not just generic language fluency.
Read moreOur Commitment to Open Source Chemistry Tools
March 17, 2026
Why ChemIllusion treats open source as core product philosophy—and how projects like rdkit-agent, our chemistry MCP server, and ChemCP help bring chemistry-aware AI tools to a wider community.
Read moreHow /skills Work: Your Chemistry AI Command Library
February 26, 2026
Discover ChemIllusion's skill system—a curated library of AI commands that turn complex chemistry tasks into simple chat interactions. Learn how to unlock the full power of AI-assisted molecular design.
Read moreThe ChemIllusion Icon Tour: Toolbar & Canvas Icons
January 30, 2026
A field guide to ChemIllusion icons—from Drawing Coach, Share, Download, and Molecule Animation to Artistic Bonds, wrapping, teaching tools, and ACS styling.
Read moreThe pain of direct AI Chat when talking about chemistry
January 28, 2026
General-purpose AI models are great at image creation but struggle with chemical accuracy. We walk through a real-world example of structure errors and how ChemIllusion delivers precision.
Read moreWhy ChemIllusion is more reliable than 'direct chat' for chemistry figures
December 18, 2025
General-purpose chat models excel at design but struggle with chemical accuracy. ChemIllusion separates chemistry interpretation from visual design for reliable scientific figures.
Read moreCopyright, Generative AI, and Scientific Visuals
December 15, 2025
Understanding copyright in scientific image generation: what's protected, what's fair use, and how copyright-safe models can help researchers use AI confidently.
Read moreIf AI image generation is supposed to be the Photoshop killer why are chemists still spending hours in photoshop?
August 25, 2025
AI tools promise to replace manual editing, yet chemists still rely on Photoshop for fine-tuning and scientific accuracy.
Read moreThe models powering ChemIllusion
Updated Jan 2, 2026
ChemIllusion blends transformer and diffusion technology, matching each model to the task it handles best.
Read moreSMILES Codes: The text behind molecules
June 1, 2025
SMILES strings encode molecular structures as text, but tokenization issues make images a clearer medium.
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