VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Mon Jun 24 2002 - 14:17:12 CDT

Dear Will,
  At the present time, there's not really a good way for VMD
to cache surface data calculated by MSMS. We have been thinking
about the need for this too, but at present the program
infrastructure to do it isn't there yet. If your purpose
is to give a presentation, then the best thing to do would be to
generate an MPEG movie showing what you want to show, so that the
speed issue with calculating surfaces becomes irrelevant. You can
then put the MPEG into your powerpoint presentation and all should
work fine. We often do this locally, even for things that would run
more than adequately well interactively, just to make it easier to
give the presentation. It is a lot easier to focus on what you're
actually saying in your presentation if you don't have to fly around
in 3-D at the same time. :-)
So, for now, my recommendation is to make an MPEG movie.
When we have a better solution for animating molecular surfaces quickly,
we'll definitely make it known on VMD-L, it is something a lot of people
could use just in day to day work. If you need more help with this,
please let us know.

Thanks,
  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Sat, Jun 22, 2002 at 03:32:12AM -0400, Will Sheffler wrote:
> Hi verious VMD gurus.
>
> I'm giving a presentation about my research this summer, and I'd like
> to play some animations in VMD. I can of course use static movies
> instead, but being able to change perspective in real time makes it
> much much easier to show what's going on in a molecular process. For
> some things, I need to have surfaces - like when illustrating binding
> pockets. But VMD renders a new surface for an 'atomselect' each time
> the animation frame is updated. Is there a way to cache the surfaces
> for each frame so they don't have to be rendered each time? Whatever
> 3D shit is in my laptop can render a surface quickly, but of course
> calculating the triangles for the surface in the first place takes
> much longer. If the surfaces could be cached, I could play an
> animation and be able to rotate and scale it in realtime.
>
> Of course, this could be remidied with a course code change, but I'm
> looking for sometime that could done by next wed. (perhaps I could
> chane the source by next wed, but I haven't even read the programmers
> guide yet so I doubt it)
>
> thanks,
>
> -Will Sheffler
> -------------------
> $console> cd /pub
> $console> more beer
> [_]3
> beer (END) 

-- 
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