VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Fri Dec 12 2003 - 10:06:50 CST

Dear Tyler,
  Drawing individual triangles with Tcl will be many times slower than
the built-in MSMS interface because they will be rendered one at a time
independently of each other, with no connectivity information. As such,
they cannot be automatically optimized by ACTC. Internally, VMD does
have the means to draw aribtrary RGB colors for triangles, the color scale
used by VMD is meant to be a convenience for the Tcl interface.

What sort of surfaces are you generating that you can't create
using the built-in MSMS interface in VMD? What parameters are you
passing MSMS in your scripted version?

Thanks,
  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Thu, Dec 11, 2003 at 03:37:33PM -0700, Tyler Luchko wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I've been trying to visualize surface properties that VMD does not
> natively suport by calling MSMS myself and drawing the triangles in VMD
> using TCL with my own colouring for the faces. The problem is that
> this is _extremely_ slow. It is slow to draw, slow to rotate and
> surprisingly slow to delete the faces. I've noticed that VMD uses ACTC
> Triangle Consolidation for drawing the MSMS surfaces and I was wondering
> if it is possible to use this from TCL as I assume that it would make
> things faster.
>
> Also, I was wondering, what are the chances that VMD will allow colouring
> with an arbitrary RGB triplet in the future? This would be much
> preferrable to using the 1040 colour pallet.
>
> Thank you,
>
> Tyler
>
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-- 
NIH Resource for Macromolecular Modeling and Bioinformatics
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