VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Thu Apr 07 2005 - 15:31:50 CDT

Hi,
  When you specify the path to POV-Ray, The movie maker plugin
needs the path to the actual POV-Ray binary, not just the
MacOS X POV-Ray bundle/directory. The errors you're getting
about renaming files are because POV-Ray failed to run and thus
there are no image files to convert. The output you're going to
get from POV-Ray should be nearly identical to what you're getting
from VMD itself or Tachyon, so if you're not happy with the results,
perhaps we should find out why before you spend time on something
that's going to give you almost identical results. What is it that
you're not happy with? Do you want to make a higher-resolution movie?
If you want to make a high-quality high-resolution movie, then you may
need to use a different movie compression tool, using the movie plugin
just for the purpose of creating the initial movie frames, but doing the
movie compression yourself with Quicktime, or whatever you feel would
give you better results.

  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Thu, Apr 07, 2005 at 10:00:51PM +0200, Suckjoon JUN wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I have a problem with Movie Maker plugin. I am using VMD 1.8.3 on my
> Powerbook (OS 10.3.8). I am trying to make a movie with renderer
> option POV-Ray, which I downloaded version 3.6 from
> http://www.povray.org/download/.
>
> In the 2nd stage, I get the error message
>
> "Could not locate povray
> Description: POV-Ray Ray Tracer
> Would you like to specify its path?"
>
> So I say 'yes' and specify its path (the file 'POV-Ray Mac 3.6'). Then
> VMD progresses to 4th stage, and I get another error message:
>
> "Error: error renaming "/'my working
> directory'/blahblahblah.0000.ppm": no such file or directory"
>
> So I go to my working directory and see what happend. VMD Movie Make
> has created bunch of .dat files but no .ppm files.
>
> What is wrong? I would very much appreciate any help from VMD users --
> I need to urgently create movies for supplementary materials of my
> rearch articles and upcoming talk in two weeks.
>
> Thank you,
> Suckjoon JUN
>
> PS. I have no problems when I use the first two internal renderers
> 'Snapshot' or 'Internal Tachyons', but the quality is not very
> satisfactory. 

-- 
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              
  WWW: http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/~johns/      Fax: 217-244-6078