VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Tue Aug 16 2011 - 10:16:56 CDT

Hi,
  Have you looked at the new ViewChangeRender plugin?
It is located in the Extensions|Visualization|ViewChangeRender menu item.
ViewChangeRender lets you record a series of camera positions, and then
build movies using them. Rather than record every single camera draw,
this plugin records "keyframe" views, and interpolates between
their positions, with user-defined speeds, etc. You may find that plugin
far easier to use than just simply recording the raw sequence of viewing
orientations obtained from the SpaceNavigator. The main issue with just
recording the raw sequence of views is that they will play at different
speeds on different machines, and you'll be recording every little twitch
of the SpaceNavigator, which can sometimes give you a "home movie" look
that's a bit shaky compared with using the approach that ViewChangeRender
uses. Try ViewChangeRender (using the SpaceNavigator to fly around of
course) and see if it does what you need. If you still want to record
the raw views on-the-fly, I can point you at existing scripts you can use
to help you get started writing your own scripts to do this.

Cheers,
  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Tue, Aug 16, 2011 at 12:16:42PM +0100, Michael Doig wrote:
> I have a Spaceball navigator mouse that I use with VMD.
>
> What I would like to do is to record the "camera position" or
> "viewpoints" in real time, as I am playing a trajectory file, and moving
> around it and scaling it using the 3D mouse. I would then like to use
> these viewpoints when rendering a movie of the trajectory.
>
> I know you can output the Spaceball positions in the console as
> described here
> (http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/minitutorials/spaceball/), but if I
> do that the visualization window does not update, so this is no good as
> I cannot see how I am moving the camera position.
>
> Any help would be greatly appreciated.
>
> Thanks,
> Michael.
>
> --
> The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
> Scotland, with registration number SC005336. 

-- 
NIH Resource for Macromolecular Modeling and Bioinformatics
Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
University of Illinois, 405 N. Mathews Ave, Urbana, IL 61801
http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/~johns/           Phone: 217-244-3349
http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/       Fax: 217-244-6078