VMD-L Mailing List

From: Andrew Dalke (dalke_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Mon Jan 27 1997 - 15:42:15 CST

Joel accidentally sent the following to me directly instead of the list:

On Jan 25, 1:24pm, Joel Berendzen, Los Alamos wrote:
> Subject: textures in VMD and rayshade scripts
> Dear Andrew & listmembers,
>
> The recent discussion about color properties has reminded me of a minor
> annoyance I've run across in making publication-quality figures that have
> textures. I've been mostly a rayshade user, although I'm starting to move
> away from that in favor of Radiance. rayshade has an annoying syntactical
> feature to the scripting language that texture specifications come after
> the declaration of the object, rather than before with the color/material
> properties. This means that editing a script to include texturing is
> more tedious than a simple text replacement of the material properties.
>
> The question this brings to mind is, with good hardware texturing
capabilities
> in the Impact graphics cards, and with full OpenGL support of texturing,
> are there any plans for implementing textures in VMD? Is there some
> support for texturing that I've missed?
>
> These issues come up most commonly in preparing B&W figures, I've found.
> There one must rely on textures to convey information that could otherwise
> be in the coloring.
>
> Cheers,
> Joel Berendzen
>-- End of excerpt from Joel Berendzen, Los Alamos

  Right now there is no support for textures in VMD, and I'm sad to say
that we have no plans for it in the near future. The biggest problem
is no one here knows much about the details of implementing texture
maps. From what I know, textures can be used in a lot of different
ways and we would really have to take some time to figure them out.

  The simplest method I can think of for the current VMD framework
would be to associate an addition material for each color, which
can be turned on or off as needed. This would do part of what you want,
as it would help distinguish b/w pictures. However, we would then have
to figure out how each of the renderers that support textures work. I
will add this to my "look into this" list.

 Texture mapping is most often used to map a (up to) 4-dimensional
property (rgb and transparency) onto a surface, and this is what is
what people usually think of for texture mapping. Molcad, from
Brickmann's group, and the upcoming Chimera from UCSF both support
this, but not VMD. Yet :)

                                                Andrew
                                                dalke_at_ks.uiuc.edu