Saving your work

After creating a set of attractive and informative representations of your molecule, you may want to save your work so that you can regenerate the scene later. There are two ways to do this in VMD:

• In the main menu, press the Save State button found in the File menu; this will bring up a browser window where you can enter a file name in which to save your work.

• In the text console, type save_state filename, where filename is the name of the file in which to save your work.

To restore your scene, you also have three choices:

• Use the Load State item in the File manu to select and load a previously saved VMD session.

• From the command line, start VMD with the options vmd -e filename, where filename was the name of the file you saved before.

• After starting VMD, from the text console, type play filename.

The most common source of problems is when VMD can't find the files you used to load the molecule. If this happens, try changing to the directory you were in when you first loaded the molecule, or edit the state file and use the full path names where you see mol new, mol addfile, or mol load commands.