VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Wed Feb 01 2012 - 10:50:30 CST

Hi,
  With custom-written shading code, you could achieve a density blob
sort of effect similar to what you describe. Another possibility would
be to synthesize a density map from the atoms, and use a volume renderer
to render the density map with either an intensity projection or ray marching
type approach. I plan to put some new volume rendering code in VMD
sometime after the VMD 1.9.1 release that's about to come out.
If you wanted to try your hand at hacking a GLSL shader, the VMD can
be made to load your own custom shaders from disk files at startup time.
You could override the behavior of the angle-modulated transparency of
edge cueing features to do something else, that might get you started quickly.

Cheers,
  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Wed, Feb 01, 2012 at 03:54:01PM -0000, Ben Hall wrote:
> I was interested in rendering a few unusual datasets and wondered if (and
> how) anyone has created images:
>
> * Where points are rendered as spheres of fog similar to the image linked
> below. Here I used transparent spheres which roughly created the effect of
> an even fog, but doesn't give appropriate increase in density at the
> centre of each sphere
>
> http://sbcb.bioch.ox.ac.uk/users/hall/Site/Visualisation_Gallery.html#1
>
> (I imagine that the effect would look like the opposite of the new angle
> modulated transparency for spheres)
>
> * Where the material appears radiant (ie to create a glowing drug in a
> binding site)?
>
> Thanks
>
> Ben
>
>
> --
> Dr Benjamin A Hall
> Centre for Computational Science, Department of Chemistry, UCL
> benjamin.a.hall_at_ucl.ac.uk
> 

-- 
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