VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Mon Jul 05 2004 - 13:52:38 CDT

Karsten,
  The most popular form of stereograms are SIRDS, single image random
dot stereograms. There are lots of free packages out on the internet
for making that variety of stereogram. Since VMD can actually render
stereo pairs, it should be possible to make a true stereo random dot
stereogram by rendering the left and right image views in VMD using
your favorite renderer (snapshot, Tachyon, POV-Ray, etc..), then run
one of these random dot stereogram generator programs on the stereo
pair to get a complete stereogram.

Some of the stereogram generators want depth images.
For those, you'd need to render the VMD scene with a ray tracer
that can emit depth values for each pixel in addition to
the color value. In any case, VMD provides the low-level mechanisms
one needs to do all of this with the built-in "left" and "right" stereo
modes, and with support for the various renderers, the rest will depend
a lot on what stereogram generator program you use. If you've got a
favorite stereogram program you already use, then it should be relatively
simple to write a short Tcl script to generate stereograms from VMD
automatically, and just a bit more work to make a GUI and add it as
a VMD extension similar to the vmdmovie plugin. If someone wants to
do the work of finding a decent stereogram generator, I'd be happy to
give suggestions on implementing a plugin, it should be relatively easy.

  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Fri, Jul 02, 2004 at 09:42:11AM +0200, Karsten Suhre wrote:
>
> Hi!
>
> Some ten years ago, autostereograms (random dot stereo images) went through
> a boom, generating a lot of interesting artwork. Last week I ran across some
> of my old books which made me wondering whether someone has already tried to
> generate autostereograms from 3-D protein structures.
>
> Wouldn't it be relatively easy to implement this as a kind of VMD plugin (or
> stereo viewing mode)? This may sound nerdy on first thought, but image for
> example that you print your latest solved structure with a flashy background
> on a conference poster.
>
> Well, I am not deep enough into the internals of VMD to do it myself, but if
> someone already did it, or has the capacities to do this easily, I would be
> very interested to hear about it.
>
> Kind regards,
>
> Karsten. 

-- 
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              
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