VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Mon Feb 25 2008 - 11:33:21 CST

Hi,
  The "rubber"-like appearance of the water molecules in that image is
the result of using the ambient occlusion rendering mode of Tachyon,
combined with the use of VMD materials that are highly diffuse.
In VMD 1.8.6, there is a material called "Diffuse", which should get
you much of the way there. The rest is done using the ambient occlusion
lighting in Tachyon. That should get you what you want. Let us know if you
have further questions on this. The ambient occlusion lighting features
in Tachyon are described in detail on that minitutorial page:
  http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/minitutorials/tachyonao/

I plan add built-in easy-to-use features for rendering images like this
with VMD and Tachyon, so this will get even easier with time. Someday
the interactive OpenGL renderings in VMD may support ambient occlusion
lighting, but the technique is quite computationally expensive, so we're
not quite there yet.

Cheers,
  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Mon, Feb 25, 2008 at 03:37:02PM +0000, Alexander Metz wrote:
> Hi to the VMD people,
>
> I have been playing a little with the Tachyon renderer and was wondering how to create a rubber-like surface as can be seen for the water molecules in this example www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/minitutorials/tachyonao/mscs.jpg . Can this be achieved by altering the Ambient/Diffuse/Specular/Opacity settings in the .dat file or is this done by texture mapping from an additional .ppm file.
>
> Thanks in advance,
>
> Alexander Metz
>
>
> Lesen Sie Ihre E-Mails jetzt einfach von unterwegs.
> www.yahoo.de/go 

-- 
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