VMD-L Mailing List

From: Marc Baaden (baaden_at_smplinux.de)
Date: Tue Nov 26 2002 - 12:02:51 CST

>>> Bogdan Costescu said:
>> > * POVRAY
>> I think that first you have to decide what you need this image for: as a
>> movie frame or as a standalone picture. For a movie, it doesn't make sense
>> (IMHO) to render more pixels than the device can show, for example when
>> presenting from a laptop/LCD projector, you are usually limited to 800x600
>> or 1024x768, so for example rendering a 720x576 image would work fine.
>> Obviously, if you want to have a nice standalone picture, you have to
>> render as many pixels as possible (compare with printer resolution) :-)
>>
>> From my experience with VMD 1.7.1 when trying to make movies, the easiest
>> is to set the VMD graphic window size to the same size as the final
>> picture size (720x576 in the above example), then set the same size on the
>> renderer's command line. This way you see in VMD approximately how the
>> final picture will look like and can zoom/slide/rotate/etc. until it looks
>> fine, but before spending too much time rendering useless pictures.

I completely agree. But there are other considerations:

1) I want this snapshot for printing, so I need a higher resolution
   (on a reasonably good printer of course :)) )
2) If you keep swaping working machines, and one has eg a display resolution
   of 1600x1200, whereas the other has 1024x768, you may still want to
   achieve the same output. So you need some machine/display independent
   setting.
3) The question arose in a script automating the process, eg trying to
   avoid that someone has to check everything by hand. For that to be
   practicable (given that the different systems will be oriented at
   different positions) you need to preview a "blank margin" making the
   rendered scene (in my experience) about 20-50% bigger than the final
   image and then afterwards cropping the blank. If not you end up with
   images that are cut off from time to time.

Cheers,
Marc 

-- 
 Dr. Marc Baaden - Laboratory of Molecular Biophysics, Oxford University
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