VMD-L Mailing List

From: Charles_at_Schwieters.org
Date: Thu Jan 29 2004 - 17:40:15 CST

Hi--

  I have noticed the following behavior in versions 1.8.1 and 1.8.2:

there's an unfortunate feature of the new ribbons drawing method:
while its shape is more visually appealing than the old ribbons
method, it does not use as many colors in the ray tracing output, so
that the discrete coloring is uglier.

To see this:
 load a structure, and color by index, and use the ribbons and new
ribbons drawing method - then render it using a ray tracer (I get the
same results with povray and tachyon).

% grep color trace.pov | sort | uniq | wc
     58 344 2923
% grep color newRibbons.pov | sort | uniq | wc
      9 50 424
% grep Color trace.dat | sort | uniq | wc
     58 634 4305
% grep Color newRibbons.dat | sort | uniq | wc
      9 95 679

One can see that the new ribbons versions contains fewer colors (9
vs. 58). Would it be possible to change the newRibbons output code to
use the larger number of colors?

thanks--
Charles 

-- 
Charles Schwieters     email:   Charles.Schwieters_at_nih.gov
		       www:     http://schwieters.org/cds
phone: (301) 402-4914  PGP key: http://schwieters.org/cds/pgp.txt