VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Mon Aug 09 2004 - 16:10:23 CDT

Hi,

On Mon, Aug 09, 2004 at 12:53:32PM -0700, Shirley Li wrote:
> Dear all,
>
> I have two questions related to the use of VMD:
>
> 1) In order to make animation with VMD, the installation of VIDEOMACHis required. However, VideoMach is a shareware, and it only allows one to use for 30 days of try. Is there any way that could solve this probem, or is there any alternative FREE program that could be used?

I don't personally know of any free MPEG encoder for Windows that's reliable
enough for the purpose, which is why I used VideoMach. If someone else knows
of a better program, I'd be happy to write the necessary software to make
the 'vmdmovie' plugin use it.

> 2) Is VMD graphics, how to add a PERSONABLE LABEL in a desired position? For example, I want to add text "2T3ns" to the graphics, how to do that?

Something like this:
  draw text { 0.0 1.0 2.0 } "2T3ns"

> 3) To label particular residue with the RESIDUE NAME followed by its ID, how to do that? The Mouse munu allows one to label atoms, bonds, and angles, I wonder if VMD support the labeling of RESIDUEs.

Here's a simple script for labelling residues with arbitrary text:

proc labelresidue { residueselection labeltext } {
  set sel [atomselect top "$residueselection and name CA"]
  set positions [$sel get {x y z}]
  set num [$sel num]
  for {set i 0} {$i < $num} {incr i} {
    draw text [lindex $positions $i] $labeltext
  }
  $sel delete
}
 
You can run it like this:
  labelresidue "resname ALA" "ALA"

  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu 

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