VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Fri Nov 17 2000 - 01:42:17 CST

Hi Eric,
  When you use the render option in the main menu, which type of
rendering are you selecting? (the default is normally "snapshot",
but you can choose amon several options...)
If you are using the "snapshot" renderer with recent versions of
VMD, it will save the on-screen OpenGL window to a Windows BMP file,
you can use _any_ image viewer to look at the created bitmap file.
For the other rendering options, most are geometry exports to external
ray tracing, radiosity, or scanline renderers such as POV-Ray,
Renderman, Tachyon, etc. Each of these external renderers supports
its own list of image file formats, and you can often change the
default rendering command line options so that the external
renderer will save the resulting image to a file of the format
that you specify. On Windows, VMD expects these external rendering
and image viewing programs to be in your path somewhere. If you can
run them by hand in a "dos shell", then VMD should be able to find
them too. If you can't run them by hand in the shell, then VMD
probably won't be able to find them either. Tachyon is a ray tracer
(that I wrote) which we package with VMD 1.6, with Tachyon, you should
_definitely_ be able to render the image, and have it save it to a
Windows Bitmap, which you should be able to view using the Windows
paint program (if you're desperate!) or even the explorer shell or
IE. If you need further help with this, send us email at
vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu and we'll help you work through it via separate
email. (not on the whole VMD-L list..)

Anyone else have comments/questions about rendering and viewing
rendered output on Windows? We're happy to help out.

Thanks,
  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Thu, Nov 16, 2000 at 03:26:20PM -0800, Eric Hu wrote:
> I installed the VMD in win98 recently. When I use render in the main menu,
> I cannot find imagemagick. Since I don't have any other windows version
> rendering software, is there a way to get around this? Thanks!
>
> Eric 

-- 
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