VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Tue Nov 04 2003 - 13:16:25 CST

Dear Taeho,
  You can make movies in the background, but to do this you must render
them using an external raytracer such as Tachyon, so that VMD will be able
to create the pictures independent of whether it has focus on the OpenGL
display. Long-term I intend to implement OpenGL pbuffer/superbuffer
support in VMD so that VMD can render to non-visible graphics memory,
using OpenGL for WYSIWYG results like what you see on the screen
(same convenience as 'snapshot') but avoiding the requirement that it
be running in the foreground on the display etc. Until I get this done
though, the only good option is to use Tachyon to render your movies
rather than Snapshot. I intend to add further support for other renderers
in the 'vmdmovie' plugin, but I started with Tachyon since I wrote it and
have fine control over how it works with VMD.

Thanks,
  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Mon, Nov 03, 2003 at 10:52:13PM -0500, taeho.kim_at_utoronto.ca wrote:
> Hi
> Is it possible to make a movie of MD trajectories via script as background job
> on Mac OSX ? not having OpenGL window (Although it seems impossible....)
> As far as I understand, current Tcl script file for making a movie does the
> following 2 main steps:
> -take a picture of each or every n-th frame
> -convert them into a movie file
>
> Thanks,
> Taeho 

-- 
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