VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Tue Oct 27 2009 - 12:05:06 CDT

Hi,
  Actually you can put an image in the background in Tachyon, but to do this
you must use a texture map applied to an object, e.g. an infinite plane.
You could either write the necessary scene objects by hand, or you could
draw a quadrilateral within VMD, and add the texture to it by hand or
by script later on.

Here's a trivial texture example cut from the "room.dat" example scene
included with Tachyon:

One of the wall pictures:
  texdef islandpic
  ambient 0.9 diffuse 0.0 specular 0.0 opacity 1.0
  color 1.0 0.6 0.4
  texfunc 9 imaps/islandpic.tga
    center -16.0 11.0 24.5
    rotate 0.0 0.0 0.0
    scale 0.071 0.071 0.1
    uaxis 1.0 0.0 0.0
    vaxis 0.0 1.0 0.0

  box
    min -16.0 11.0 24.5
    max -2.0 25.0 25.0
    islandpic

The ceiling texture:
  texdef ceiling
    ambient 0.4 diffuse 0.8 specular 0.0 opacity 1.0
    color 1.0 1.0 1.0
    texfunc 9 imaps/whtceil.ppm
      center 0.0 0.0 0.0
      rotate 0.0 0.0 0.0
      scale 0.1 0.1 0.1
      uaxis 1.0 0.0 0.0
      vaxis 0.0 0.0 1.0

  plane
    center 0.0 30.0 0.0
    normal 0.0 -1.0 0.0
    ceiling

Try playing around with that and let me know if you need help.

I would be willing to add an easy-to-use "background image" feature
to Tachyon if enough people would find it useful.

Cheers,
  John

On Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 12:23:48PM -0400, Axel Kohlmeyer wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 27, 2009 at 11:27 AM, daniel aguayo <bioquimico_at_gmail.com> wrote:
> > Dear All
> > I want to render my protein with a customized background
> > Can we use a image file as background in Tachyon?
> > I know I can do that with Pov-ray.. but I'm using tachyon to
> > render it.
>
> no, but it is easy to use a "green screen" trick. i.e. you put a color
> in the background that is not used in your visualization, render and
> then cut away this color in programs like gimp or photoshop and
> then add your background to it.
>
> cheers,
> axel.
> >
> > Tks for all
> >
> > Daniel Aguayo V.
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > saludos desde el fin del mundo
> >
>
>
>
> --
> Dr. Axel Kohlmeyer akohlmey_at_gmail.com
> Institute for Computational Molecular Science
> College of Science and Technology
> Temple University, Philadelphia PA, USA. 

-- 
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