VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Wed Mar 21 2012 - 11:34:24 CDT

Hi,
  At present, VMD doesn't allow you to set an arbitrary RGB color
for an arbitrary color category item. Instead, you can set the RGB color
for one of named color indices (or one of the color scale indices for
that matter) and you can subsequently set the color that way.
The color system in VMD was written to ensure highly efficient rendering,
but that has limited flexibility somewhat. Since modern GPUs are capable
of handling far more frequent color state changes without associated
performance penalties, I have been planning on redesigning the color controls
in VMD to allow arbitrary RGB colors in all places where one wants to assign
a color. This is going to be something that shows up in a future release,
as it requires a lot of changes to the OpenGL rendering code and also to
the scene export modules in VMD. I will let people know when there is a
test version of VMD that implements this feature, because I know it is
important to many users.

Cheers,
  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Mon, Mar 19, 2012 at 05:47:14PM +0100, Roger Nadler wrote:
> I am trying to set a color via vmdrc. I successfully can do so by adding
> for instance:
> color Element Ti blue2
> However, Id' like to set a color that is not in the list by adding
> something like:
> color Element Ti {0.25 0.57 0.0}
> where the numbers indicate the rgb values, but so far I did not succeed.
> Is there actually a way to do that? Also, I'd like to know if it would
> be possible to define a new colorID which appears in the color controls
> window under the name I've defined in vmdrc? Thank you very much for
> your help.
> Regards,
> Roger
>
> 

-- 
NIH Resource for Macromolecular Modeling and Bioinformatics
Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
University of Illinois, 405 N. Mathews Ave, Urbana, IL 61801
http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/~johns/           Phone: 217-244-3349
http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Research/vmd/       Fax: 217-244-6078