VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Mon Jul 29 2002 - 11:01:12 CDT

Dear Adrian,
  The aliasing artifacts you're seeing with the white background are
also present with any other background, but they are much less noticable
due to the way we see things. The easiest way to counteract this effect
is to do one of two things:
 1) Run VMD on a machine that supports multisample antialiasing
    (i.e. Sun XVR-1000, NVidia GeForce 3, Onyx2 InfiniteReality2, etc)
    If you setup your video card appropriately, VMD will be able to
    enable hardware antialiasing, and your snapshots from within VMD should
    look much better.

 2) In the general case, you can get much higher quality rendering results
    by using one of the external rendering programs. If you are using
    a VMD 1.8 pre-release then I would recomment using Tachyon, as it is now
    the closest matched to the way VMD itself renders. If you're using one
    of the older versions of VMD, then POV-Ray or Tachyon are your best bets.
    In addition to allowing antialiasing, the external renderers can be made
    to render your images at a much higher default resolution.

If you need help with this, let us know and we can provide more assistance.

Thanks,
  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Mon, Jul 29, 2002 at 10:18:26AM -0500, owner-vmd-l_at_ks.uiuc.edu wrote:
> Date: Mon, 29 Jul 2002 11:18:59 -0400
> From: "Adrian E. Roitberg" <roitberg_at_qtp.ufl.edu>
> To: vmd-l_at_ks.uiuc.edu
> Subject: white background
>
> Dear vmdrs.
>
> I have a quick question: I have found that when I used a white
> background for my figures, all edges look very jagged, and it does not
> look quite pretty. Darker backgrounds looks really good. This is true so
> far on SGIs, Win2K and Sun stations.
>
> Any suggestions ? I really need a white background figure fast.
>
> Thanks !
> --
> Dr. Adrian E. Roitberg
> Quantum Theory Project and Department of Chemistry
>
> University of Florida PHONE 352 392-6972
> P.O. Box 118435 FAX 352 392-8722
> Gainesville, FL 32611-8435 Email roitberg_at_qtp.ufl.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