From: Eric Smoll (ericsmoll_at_gmail.com)
Date: Wed Oct 15 2014 - 22:25:37 CDT

Hello John,

That makes sense. Thank you for the explanation.

Best,
Eric

On Wed, Oct 15, 2014 at 9:03 PM, John Stone <johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu> wrote:

> Hi,
> Ray tracers don't like lines or points, because they are
> infinitesimal objects that don't have a width, and such an
> object can't ever be hit by a ray... VMD tries to emulate
> lines and points by drawing very thin cylinders and spheres,
> but there's a limit to the efficacy of this approach, and in
> general it is best to draw cylinders and spheres rather than
> lines and points when working with ray tracers... Lines and
> points are really only useful in the context of rasterization
> where they bear some relationship to the pixel grid of the
> screen...
>
> Cheers,
> John Stone
> vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu
>
> On Wed, Oct 15, 2014 at 08:46:05PM -0600, Eric Smoll wrote:
> > Hello VMD users,
> >
> > Lines generated with "graphics top line {# # #} {# # #} width 2" show
> up
> > in theA OpenGL display but are not rendered with a command like
> "render
> > POV3 name.pov povray +W# +H# -Iname.pov -Oname.png +D +X +A +FN" Is
> there
> > some reason why this would fail?
> > Best,
> > Eric
>
> --
> NIH Center 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/
>