VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Fri Feb 18 2011 - 11:51:14 CST

Ajasja,
  Glad you're having fun with the Anaglyph stereo mode. :)
Something I have been working on in my free time is developing a
standalone stereoscopic image display tool. I've been using it to
display both image pairs rendered from VMD, and also stereo shots
from my digital SLR and a special camera bracket I made.

In the context of VMD, what is cool about it is that it lets me
make stereoscopic images using Tachyon, POV-Ray, or various other
high quality rendering methods available within VMD, and view them
outside of VMD.

One of the things I've been thinking about for a subsequent rev of
VMD is to add this code into VMD itself so that one could show arbitrary
images in the background of the VMD OpenGL window, and I could also
make it possible to show the Tachyon or POV-Ray images "in place",
in VMD itself without having to launch a separate image viewer after
each rendering, and since the code supports stereo, one could view
stereoscopic renderings in Tachyon or POV-Ray far more convenientily
than is currently the case. I haven't decided exactly how this
would work, but its another one of the items on my TODO list for the summer.

Cheers,
  John

On Fri, Feb 18, 2011 at 06:07:59PM +0100, Ajasja Ljubeti?? wrote:
> Thank you for the info.
> And thank you also for the anaglyph rendering that is now working without
> quad buffering. I'm having a fun time surprising my coworkers with
> the amount of 3D perception one can get out of two parts of color plastic
> foil:)
>
> Best regards,
> Ajasja
> On Fri, Feb 18, 2011 at 17:06, John Stone <johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu> wrote:
>
> Hi Ajasja,
> It's not off topic and nobody will flame you. :)
> Doing 64-bit Windows builds is on my TODO list, but if I make one it
> will
> only be considered "experimental" at present. I'll have to see how
> stable
> Tcl/Tk/FLTK are on Windows x64 before I commit. I understand that
> you're
> anxious to be able to use more physical memory, and I'm working on this
> stuff,
> but I'm the only developer working on the core of VMD and these things
> take
> time. I am planning to make another VMD release already this summer,
> and
> 64-bit Windows and MacOS X versions are two of the items slated for that
> release. If I am able to get a 64-bit Windows build running well, I may
> make
> it available as an experimental build for people to try out, but it
> won't
> be an "official" binary for the imminent VMD 1.9 release.
>
> The other thing to keep in mind, is that we always make test versions of
> VMD available between official releases usually about once every week or
> so, and so the instant I have a 64-bit Windows version, people will be
> able
> to start using it regardless of how official it is.
>
> Cheers,
> John
> On Fri, Feb 18, 2011 at 11:03:41AM +0100, Ajasja Ljubeti?? wrote:
> > I hope this is not to off topic and you won't flame me for this,
> but is
> > there any chance for an official windows 64 bit build of VMD 1.9?
> It would
> > be nice to be able to use more than 4GB for loading trajectories...
> > Best regards,
> > Ajasja
> >
> > On Fri, Feb 18, 2011 at 02:57, David Joiner <djoiner_at_kean.edu>
> wrote:
> >
> > Sounds fun.
> >
> > Right now I have both MS Visual C++ Express and Cygwin with gcc
> and
> > make installed. Versions are listed below.
> >
> > Microsoft Visual Studio 2010
> > Version 10.0.30319.1 RTMRel
> > Microsoft .NET Framework
> > Version 4.0.30319 RTMRel
> >
> > Installed Version: VC Express
> >
> > bash-3.2$ gcc --version
> > gcc (GCC) 4.3.4 20090804 (release) 1
> > Copyright (C) 2008 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
> > This is free software; see the source for copying conditions.
> There is
> > NO
> > warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A
> PARTICULAR
> > PURPOSE.
> >
> > bash-3.2$ make --version
> > GNU Make 3.81
> > Copyright (C) 2006 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
> > This is free software; see the source for copying conditions.
> > There is NO warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR
> A
> > PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
> >
> > This program built for i686-pc-cygwin
> > bash-3.2$
> >
> > Thanks!
> > Dave.
> > On Thu, Feb 17, 2011 at 3:40 PM, John Stone <johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu>
> wrote:
> > >
> > > David,
> > > Compiling VMD for windows is quite involved, but if you're
> > > doing a CAVE build, there's really no alternative approach.
> > > The reason it is complex is because you first have to have all
> > > of the library depencies compiled and in-place, then the VMD
> plugins,
> > > and then VMD itself. The other thing to watch out for is that
> all
> > > of the libraries and VMD itself have to be compiled using the
> same
> > > runtime settings in the Microsoft tools, so that you don't have
> > > various kinds of DLL conflicts for MSVCRT.DLL, etc.
> > >
> > > If you're an experienced Windows developer, then none of this
> is
> > > news to you, but most people that ask about Windows compilation
> > > don't realize what they are actually getting into... :-)
> > >
> > > One problem you will have to resolve (I will be happy to try
> and help
> > > as much as possible):
> > > We have never compiled VMD with CAVElib support on Windows...
> > > Although VMD uses the standard CAVElib routines in most places,
> > > it makes extensive use of CAVElib-provided shared memory for
> storage
> > > of its internal scene graph (all of the geometry that gets
> drawn by
> > > the renderer worker processes/threads).
> > > I don't know if that functionality is replicated in the Windows
> > versions
> > > of CAVElib or not. Even if it is, another complication is
> whether the
> > > Windows implementation of CAVElib is done using threads or with
> > separate
> > > processes. VMD was written when CAVElib was always implemented
> with
> > > separate processes, and since the UIUC CAVEs have always run a
> > process-based
> > > CAVElib, I don't know if there will be any hidden "gotchas"
> with
> > > unintentionally shared data between worker threads in a Windows
> > CAVElib.
> > >
> > > To start out with, I think you'll have to compile VMD from
> source on
> > Windows,
> > > and once you get that far, we can work on whatever CAVElib
> issues that
> > arise
> > > after that.
> > >
> > > To build VMD on windows, you need to use the Cygwin utilities
> for GNU
> > make,
> > > but the actual source code compilation is done using the
> Microsoft
> > compilers.
> > >
> > > If you tell me what compiler versions you have installed, we
> can
> > proceed
> > > from there.
> > >
> > > Cheers,
> > > John Stone
> > > vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu
> > >
> > > On Thu, Feb 17, 2011 at 03:12:44PM -0500, David Joiner wrote:
> > >> I know this question has been asked before, but as the answer
> is
> > >> usually "Do you really want to do that?" (and the response is
> usually
> > >> "I guess not") I'll ask again.
> > >>
> > >> How do you compile VMD from source for Windows?
> > >>
> > >> I ask because I want to compile VMD with CAVElib options to
> run on a
> > >> Windows XP Cave.
> > >>
> > >> Dave Joiner
> > >
> > > --
> > > 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
> > >
>
> --
> 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 

-- 
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