VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Mon May 14 2007 - 12:57:26 CDT

Hi,
  I've been contemplating redesigning the rendering interface in VMD
to export scenes as a collection of files either in a subdirectory of
some kind, a .zip file, or something along those lines. This would
make it much easier to emit multiple scene components, logically separating
materials, shaders, scene geometry, and camera/viewing parameters and
making it easier to do the types of things you mention in your email.
Doing this will only be practical if I plan to break backwards compatibility
with older versions of VMD, so I don't plan to do it until we're ready
to make significant changes in the export/rendering system beyond just
the file structure. If I can come up with a reasonable way of doing this
in an evoluationary process, I'll pursue it, it's just a lot of code to
change and I'd rather not have to maintain both new and old versions
of this system. I'll see what I can do to accomodate this as I plan
the changes to the rendering system that are already in the workds.

Cheers,
  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Sat, May 12, 2007 at 01:45:01PM +0200, Szymon Zietkiewicz wrote:
> Dear VMD Developers and Users,
>
> I use VMD for both protein visualization and generation of PoV files for
> further use. Recently I have to render a series of large pictures of
> proteins for an "festival of science" - so they have to be aesthetically
> pleasing rather than very "scientific". Doing so I have found that the
> .pov files generated by VMD, although producing very nice results, are
> very hard for subsequent reworking in PoVRay. To faciliate my work I have
> to separate the protein structure definition from the rest of scene
> description by moving the most of .pov file to .inc file (makes life
> easier when adding additional lights, backgrounds ect, without the need
> to parse and render protein itself). Then, I have to manually
> find/replace each rgbt definition for particular representations in
> created .inc file with appropriate variable declared at the top so that I
> would be able to adjust colors without creating a new .pov file from VMD.
> I wonder, where it would be possible for next versions of VMD to do this
> operations for me, by generating separate .pov file with camera, lights
> etc., and .inc file with protein itself (favourably with each graphical
> representation individually), with the colors, where possible, declared
> as variables.
> Similar thing is done in pov output of DeepView, although I prefer work
> with VMD even at the cost of doing all the above mentioned operations by
> myself
> :-)
>
> thanks,
>
> Szymon 

-- 
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