From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Tue Jul 31 2018 - 21:41:59 CDT

Hi,
  It appears that you built Tachyon without threads support, which is
a pretty big problem. I would suggest running the Tachyon binaries I
provide with VMD, as there's (presently) no significant advantage to
using built-in PNG support vs. using something like ImageMagick's
'convert' utility to take a Targa file and convert it to PNG.
Try running my standard Tachyon binaries, and let me know if that
gets stuck during rendering of your scene also, or not.

Best,
  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Wed, Aug 01, 2018 at 09:22:46AM +0900, Tony Myung Keun Cho wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> first of all, thank you for reading this email.
> Hoping to make high quality images of molecular structures in vmd, I
> learned how to render using tachyon instead of using the snapshot.
> I am having trouble with rendering png files from dat files using tachyon.
> "Rendering complete" remains at 19% without proceeding even if I let it
> run for 20 minutes or so.
> I am using vmd 1.9.4a12 .
> I installed [1]Tachyon 0.99 beta 6 and compiled tachyon separately with
> libpng and libjpeg library.
> I replaced this newly compiled software to the vmd library, but it still
> doesn't work.
> The tips from
> "[2]https://lixinsun.mit.edu/blog/compile-tachyon-libpng-linuxmacos-vmd-rendering"
> was followed.
> $ ~/Downloads/PROGRAMS/vmd/lib/vmd/tachyon_LINUXAMD64 charmm2gmx.dat +V
> -format PNG -o charmm2gmx.png
> Tachyon Parallel/Multiprocessor Ray Tracer  Version 0.99 Â
> Copyright 1994-2013,   John E. Stone <[3]john.stone_at_gmail.com>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> Scene Parsing Time:Â Â Â Â 0.2132 seconds
> CPU Information:
>  Node   0: 1 CPUs, CPU Speed 1.00, Node Speed  1.00 Name: mcho
> Â Total CPUs: 1
> Â Total Speed: 1.000000
>
> Scene contains 51334 objects.
> Global bounds: -1.06786 -0.446472 -1.09591 -> 1.06305 0.67197 1.07739
> Creating top level grid: X:58 Y:58 Z:58
> Grid:Â X: 58Â Y: 58Â Z: 58Â Cells:Â Â 195112Â Obj:Â Â Â 51334Â
> Obj/Cell:Â Â 0.263
> Scene contains 0 non-gridded objects
>
> Allocating Image Buffer.
> Preprocessing Time:Â Â Â Â 0.0243 seconds
> Rendering Progress:Â Â Â Â Â Â Â 19% complete
> The ldd command seems like it is connected, so I don't know where the
> problem could be.
> > ldd ./tachyon_LINUXAMD64
> linux-vdso.so.1 =>Â (0x00007ffe06ea5000)
> Â Â Â libjpeg.so.8 => /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libjpeg.so.8
> (0x00007fafd776f000)
> Â Â Â libpng12.so.0 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libpng12.so.0
> (0x00007fafd754a000)
> Â Â Â libm.so.6 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libm.so.6 (0x00007fafd7241000)
> Â Â Â libc.so.6 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6 (0x00007fafd6e77000)
> Â Â Â libz.so.1 => /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libz.so.1 (0x00007fafd6c5d000)
> Â Â Â /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x00007fafd79c8000)
> I used two computers to run this but both computers cannot render at the
> moment.
> Moreover, dat file I first created is about 11 mb. I am not sure if this
> is too large for tachyon to process.
> I would really appreciate your help.
> Best regards,
> Tony Cho
>
> References
>
> Visible links
> 1. http://jedi.ks.uiuc.edu/~johns/raytracer/files/0.99b6
> 2. https://lixinsun.mit.edu/blog/compile-tachyon-libpng-linuxmacos-vmd-rendering
> 3. mailto:john.stone_at_gmail.com

-- 
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/