VMD-L Mailing List

From: Axel Kohlmeyer (akohlmey_at_gmail.com)
Date: Sat Nov 02 2013 - 01:21:02 CDT

On Sat, Nov 2, 2013 at 3:02 AM, Bryan Roessler <roessler_at_uab.edu> wrote:
> I'm trying to render some scenes above my native resolution that use ambient
> occlusion, so I am using the external Tachyon renderer. However, when I try

why not the internal tachyon renderer? all the necessary settings can
also be applied through the GUI via Display->Display Settings...

> to run the file render, the tachyon dat file is generated OK, but the
> post-render fails because "tachyon_WIN32.exe is not compatible with the
> version of Windows you are running" (Windows 7 x64, which is strange because
> I've never had problems running a 32-bit program on here before). Very well,
> I downloaded the x64 binary and tried to rerun it but the post-processing
> doesn't generate anything.
>
> My render command generated by the file render script is as follows:
> render Tachyon image.dat "C:\Program Files (x86)\University of
> Illinois\VMD\tachyon_WIN32.exe" -aasamples 12 %s -format BMP -res 1826 2084
> -o %s.bmp
>
> Another strange thing is that if I enter the above manually, the whitespace
> in the path gives me fits. I tried escaping the backslashes and the
> whitespace and it still did not cooperate. I also used curly braces in lieu
> of the quotes and still, no go. Why are the post-render commands nearly
> impossible to pass manually in Windows? I don't even know how it's possible

the problems are mostly due to the idiosyncrasies of windows which are
enhanced by the fact that practically no VMD development is happening
on windows. developing applications for windows is only reasonably
convenient, if you use a windows-only workflow and non-portable tools.
for any cross-platform application, that is not possible, and making a
unix-like development environment work on windows is a major pain. i
for myself only started to provide windows binaries for people after
linux distributions started packaging linux-to-windows cross
compilers, which allow to use the same workflow, development and build
environment throughout.

> at this point and why the file render plugin can manage to do it correctly,
> but I can't.

vmd has a "shim" in the exectool plugin that hides the platform
specific quirks from other plugins.

> I've been playing around with this all day but can't get it to work. Been
> using Windows shell as well as the Tcl interpreter in case it was a syntax
> problem. Also reinstalled VMD. Help!

axel.

>
> Bryan Roessler | Graduate Research Assistant
> UAB | The University of Alabama at Birmingham
> uab.edu/cmdb
> Knowledge that will change your world
> 

-- 
Dr. Axel Kohlmeyer  akohlmey_at_gmail.com  http://goo.gl/1wk0
International Centre for Theoretical Physics, Trieste. Italy.