Here is some software for converting XYZ files into viewable, animatable images. I'm trying to get this to work with the kinds of XYZ files I find on Al Globus' web site, which are concatenations of XYZ files, one per frame. This should be most of the way to handling those. You will need ImageMagick to turn the output of xyz2rgb.c into a GIF or JPEG file. There's also a program called 'animate' (I think it's also part of ImageMagick, if not, it's part of PovRay) that will allow you to view a sequence of images as an animation. To compile xyz2rgb.c, type: gcc -O2 -Wall -o xyz2rgb xyz2rgb.c -lm It offers lots of command line options for controlling all kinds of things.