VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Mon Apr 24 2006 - 16:30:38 CDT

Al,
  All of the rendering options currently base the final output resolution
settings on the current size of the VMD OpenGL graphics window at the time
you generate the scene. This is a bit of a hold-over from the era when
most people only generated images at screen-resolution. In order to render
very high resolution images, one would normally use one of the external
rendering programs suchy as Tachyon, Raster3D, or POV-Ray, for example.
In the case of these external renderers, VMD will generate a scene file
(text file containing geometry descriptions) which can be read by the
associated external rendering program, and used to render an arbitrary
resolution output image. In the case of POV-Ray, one can simply add
some command line arguments when running the 'povray' executable, to
specify the desired output resolution. In the case of Tachyon, one
can edit the scene file and replace the "Resolution" value at the top
of the file with whatever resolution is appropriate. Increasing the
resolution of the input file will increase the rendering time significantly,
but that's generally how it is done. For the next version of VMD I plan
to make a new rendering plugin that makes all of this signficantly easier
for a non-expert.

  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Mon, Apr 24, 2006 at 02:19:52PM -0700, Al Courey wrote:
> Could you please explain for someone (like me) who is not an expert
> how to render high resolution images using VMD
>
> I'm using a mac running OSX 10.4 (powerpc)
>
> When I use the render command, I can only get low resolution images
> using the tachyon internal format. It doesn't matter how the
> resolution settings are set.
>
> I've tried using the tachyon, raster3D formats, formats POV3. These
> create files that I can't figure out how to open up on my Mac.
>
> Step by step instructions would be greatly appreciated.
>
> Al Courey 

-- 
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