VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Sat Mar 31 2001 - 11:02:23 CST

Hi Brian,
  If I understand your question correctly, there is presently no way
for VMD to save representations or selections for a particular frame or
frames in an animation. The representation is set for "all frames",
when you animate, it just gets applied to subsequent frames until it
is changed again. When VMD was designed this decision was surely a good
one, as the amount of memory available on machines of the time was such
that saving anything on a per-frame basis would have been troublesome.
Now that many desktop computers are coming with 256MB of memory or more,
it may be practical for VMD to implement per-frame features where
reps, selections, or other data might be associated uniquely with a frame
or frames of a trajectory animation. The main concern I'd have is that
if we did provide a mechanism for setting such things on a per-frame basis,
we'd have to do some work to make it usable for most people, ideally there'd
be some new user interface that'd let you scroll down a timeline of the
trajectory setting reps, selections, etc over certain spans of frames.

I'd have to say though, that implementing all of that would probably be
something for "VMD 2.0" rather than an incremental evoluationary version.
We would probably want to redesign a lot of how VMD works in order to
accomodate stuff like that. VMD would need to become even more
"dynamics-centric" than it is presently.

So, in answer to your question, I don't think there's any nice way to
do what you want. You could probably load in a bunch of frames as separate
molecules or something, but that has its own issues, and wouldn't let you
view the animation without using a script either.

Thanks for using VMD,
  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Fri, Mar 30, 2001 at 11:40:43PM -0800, B. Bennion wrote:
> Hello,
> Does anyone know how to make a representation for a frame actually
> "stick"? When running through a set of frames using modselect, modstyle
> ... how can I make that frame keep that representation without having to
> rerun the scripts.
>
> For instance I am showing the hydration layer of a protein. The layer is
> calculated at each frame and then the representation altered through
> modselect. After the script is run, all the frames have the atom
> selections of the last frame and not their own time point.
>
> Any ideas
> Brian
>
> Graduate Research Assistant
> Dep. Medicinal Chemistry, University of Washington
> Tel# (206)616-2779
> BOX 357610 Seattle WA 98195
>
> email--bbennion_at_u.washington.edu
> web page--http://students.washington.edu/bbennion 

-- 
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