VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Wed Mar 13 2002 - 10:34:28 CST

Dear Adrian,
  I have some answers for your questions about the VMD rendering
and movie making features.
  1) At the present time, VMD generates the headers for the POV-Ray
     and other scene exports internally. One of the things we have
     planned to improve the scene export feature in VMD is to make the
     per-renderer header settings much more user-configurable. This will
     allow us to expose many of the special features of the individual
     rendering programs, and will give the user much more control over
     the resulting image. The current versions of VMD really only give
     you this level of control for options that can be set by modifying
     the POV-Ray rendering command that VMD uses to generate the picture.
     While this works well for the image size, antialiasing, and similar
     options, it isn't as flexible as we'd like. A complete solution will
     involve having custom per-renderer dialog boxes with configurable
     options for each ray tracer.

  2) We've never seen the Tk error you're having on your Sun box,
     I actually wrote the 'vmdmovie' script on a Sun machine, so it
     must be something particular about your machines or their software.
     Can you tell me more about your machines? Are they running
     CDE, or some other window manager? What color depth are your
     displays set to? Any information you can send me may be helpful
     in figuring out what causes that Tk error.

Let us know if you have more questions.

Thanks,
  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Wed, Mar 13, 2002 at 08:22:32AM -0500, Adrian E. Roitberg wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> First, thanks to the developers for vmdmovie !! makes life much
> easier...
>
> I have a 'bug report' and a question.
>
> question:
>
> Is there any way to tweak the defaults for povray ? I would like to
> manually play with the .pov (or .dat file within vmdmovie) to change
> some
> of the colorings, camera position, etc. However, the 'headers' for pov
> input seems to be hardwired within vmd. Is this true ?
>
> If so, is the only way to go into the source code, change stuff and
> rebuild ?
>
> Bug : (?) On vmdmovie, un Solaris, upon pressing the 'working directory'
> button, I get errors in the console related to tk.
>
> bgerror failed to handle background error
> Original error: invalid command name
> ::tk::dialog::file::chooseDir::tkChooseDirectory
> Error in bgerror: invalid command name "bgerror"
>
>
> Anyone out there can help ?
>
> PS: the dir chooser works fine under my sgi irix platform.
>
> Thanks !!
> a.
>
>
>
>
> --
> Dr. Adrian E. Roitberg
> Quantum Theory Project and Department of Chemistry
> University of Florida PHONE 352 392-6972
> P.O. Box 118435 FAX 352 392-8722
> Gainesville, FL 32611-8435 Email roitberg_at_qtp.ufl.edu
> ==================================================================== 

-- 
NIH Resource for Macromolecular Modeling and Bioinformatics
Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
University of Illinois, 405 N. Mathews Ave, Urbana, IL 61801
Email: johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu                 Phone: 217-244-3349              
  WWW: http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/~johns/      Fax: 217-244-6078