VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Fri Sep 12 2008 - 11:27:01 CDT

Hi,
  Generally speaking, not all of the things that VMD is able to
render interactively will be rendered in by any particular external
renderer. This is the result of the wide range in the completeness
of capabilities and features supported by the external renderers vs.
what exists in the VMD OpenGL renderer. Of the external renderers,
the POV-Ray and Tachyon support are the most complete, but even they
have limitations as you have discovered. The specific issue you have
raised is something I'm working on presently, and I plan to have addressed
before VMD 1.8.7 is released. I've got a couple other rendering related
things I have on my TODO list, and I'll probably do them all at once.
For VMD 1.8.7, I'll likely only have texturing implemented for Tachyon.
It should be possible to implement it for POV-Ray as well, but I think
that's going to have to wait for a subsequent release. I'll send an email
to VMD-L when I have the new rendering code in place for Tachyon, so
that people can test it. If there are motivated people interested in
working on improving the POV-Ray export, I'd be happy to give guidance
in developing the code.

Cheers,
  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Thu, Sep 11, 2008 at 08:16:29PM +0100, lillestolen wrote:
> Hi All,
>
>
> I'm new to vmd, so forgive me if I missed this in the manual or on the
> website. I'm trying to use the color mapping by potential technique
> (similar to the tutorial at
> http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/plugins/apbsrun/colorbypot.html),
> and am able to generate the image just fine in the vmd graphics window.
> However when I go to render it I get a plain white surface. Further
> inspection in the console window shows me the warnings:
>
> Warning) Text not exported for this renderer
> Warning) Texture mapping not exported for this renderer
>
> This happens for both Tachyon (both versions) and POV3 rendering, and
> also occurs when I try to render the example given above. It appears
> that there was a discussion about this ca 2005 on the mailing list, but
> I can't find anything more recent about this issue. Is there anything I
> can do to get the color mapping to render in either of the above
> programs? Thanks very much in advance for any assistance,
>
> regards,
>
> TIm Lillestolen
> Wheatley Group
> University of Nottingham
>
> p.s. I'm using the 1.8.6 (April 6,2007) version on suse 10.3 as well as
> PovRay 3.6.1. The problem is also reproducible using the Mac 1.8.6
> version of VMD with Tachyon.
>
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-- 
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