VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Fri Jun 22 2007 - 15:35:12 CDT

Hi,

On Fri, Jun 22, 2007 at 03:26:00PM -0400, Axel Kohlmeyer wrote:
> don't know, whether i mentioned that before, but can you comment about
> how feasable it would be to have a mechanism to load external graphics
> on top of, e.g., a rectangle? i remember we were discussing leopard
> skin patterned VDW reps at some time...

Bill-boarded fonts would work for renderers that can do both texturing
and also have a provision for handling an alpha channel to modulate the
texture, but this is as frought with difficulty as doing it by simulating
lines, since each renderer has differences there. I'll likely have more
to say about that after I have the volumetric textures working in
Tachyon and POV-Ray.

> the reason for this would be, that the typical 'wire style labels' are
> not always very readable, and writing a label externally (e.g. with
> GIMP) can produce more readable text and a proper background so the text
> stands out, i can see plenty of ways to use something like this, up
> the the point of changing the text/graphics in each frame.

Yes, I agree.

  John 

-- 
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
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