VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Tue Aug 27 2013 - 11:36:54 CDT

Holger,
  Can you send me (no need to send to the whole VMD-L list) a copy of
one of your Tachyon images where the color scale bar didn't look right?
If I recall correctly, the current color scale bar code isn't as good as
it could be, and it emits a huge number of lines, which it "gets away with"
when using OpenGL, but when using a ray tracer these don't look good.
The solution would likely be to rewrite the color scale bar to emit a
connected triangle mesh, which would look the same in OpenGL and in a
ray tracer. In any case, if you can send me one of your images, that
will verify that I'm remembering this correctly.

Cheers,
  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Sat, Aug 24, 2013 at 07:44:47AM +0000, Holger Scheib wrote:
> Hello everyone
> I'm using VMD for a wide range of research tasks and I do like it a lot.
> Amongst these tasks is using it for creating images for publications. My
> problem is linked to this as following:
> I want to export a Tachyon-rendered image of a protein in surface
> representation. Surface charges have been calculated with APBS. In order
> to make sense of these colors I need to show the "color scale bar" with
> its legend. I figured out how to place the bar and how to scale it in
> size. However, when I scale it, the color bar itself changes size, but
> label size is not affected. If anyone knows how to change this I'd
> appreciate your input.
> The more pressing problem is that although my protein surface looks
> terrific when I export it using Tachyon, the quality of the color scale
> bar won't come close to the quality of the image. Is there a way to
> improve the quality of the "color scale bar" in images? Do you know of any
> workaround?
> Many thanks!
> Bye for now,
> Holger 

-- 
NIH Center 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/