VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Fri Dec 21 2001 - 11:08:48 CST

Dear Sanjeev,
  If the images you produce with VMD are too "shiny"
(specular reflections) you can easily adjust this in the new
versions of the progrma using the "Material" form, in conjunction
with the material selector in the Graphics form. Just create a
new material based on the non-editable "Opaque" default material.
Once you've created the new material, go to the Graphics form, and
change your representations to use your new material instead of the
default "Opaque". Once this is done, go back to the Material form
and turn down the "specular" slider for your new material to 0.0,
and you should see all of the shiny spots go away on your molecule.
Using the Material form, you have a great deal of control over how
things get lighted in VMD. The "shininess" control affects the
size (i.e. phong exponent) used to render the shiny spots, if you raise
this setting, it makes the shiny spots smaller/tighter.

If you need to produce renderings that are higher resolution than
what you see in the VMD graphics window, another option is to use
external ray tracers like POV-Ray, Tachyon, etc. These can render at
arbitrarily high resolution and have more sophisticated lighting and
transparency, but are often a little more challenging to tweak the
way you want them to be.

We are interested in adding support for more exports in VMD, to programs
like Molscript and some others. We'll make an announcement about some
things we're working on pretty soon, probably early next year, regarding
plug-in renderers, file readers, etc. They won't be in VMD 1.7.1 but
the next version of VMD will have them. VMD 1.7.1 will probably be ready
for release in the next few days if testing continues to go well.

If you need detailed help getting good images for publication from VMD,
please let us know and we'll give you tips to achieve what you have in
mind.

Thanks,
  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Fri, Dec 21, 2001 at 10:25:12PM +0530, Sanjeev B.S. wrote:
> Hello,
> I use VMD most of the time so much that I am not acquanited with
> anything like Molscript and its family of programs. Now I need to make
> some pictures for publication and I find it very difficult to make them
> VMD. Sometimes the 'Render' doesnot give satisfactory images and when I
> try to grab the images (typically using 'xv' on linux) I run into lots of
> problems. The 'lights' causes problems in printing by making some regions
> almost invisble, and the o/p will not exactly what is wanted by the best
> of standards. Moreover it becomes very difficult if we change the image
> size later as it introduces some/lot distortions.
>
> I might have missed some developements in VMD and I would
> greateful to anyone who suggests me a remedy. Or at least, can VMD
> generate a molscript file?
>
> Thanks in advance for any help,
>
> Sincerely,
> -Sanjeev 

-- 
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