VMD-L Mailing List

From: Szymon Zietkiewicz (szymon_at_biotech.ug.gda.pl)
Date: Sat May 12 2007 - 06:45:01 CDT

Dear VMD Developers and Users,

I use VMD for both protein visualization and generation of PoV files for
further use. Recently I have to render a series of large pictures of
proteins for an "festival of science" - so they have to be aesthetically
pleasing rather than very "scientific". Doing so I have found that the
.pov files generated by VMD, although producing very nice results, are
very hard for subsequent reworking in PoVRay. To faciliate my work I have
to separate the protein structure definition from the rest of scene
description by moving the most of .pov file to .inc file (makes life
easier when adding additional lights, backgrounds ect, without the need
to parse and render protein itself). Then, I have to manually
find/replace each rgbt definition for particular representations in
created .inc file with appropriate variable declared at the top so that I
would be able to adjust colors without creating a new .pov file from VMD.
I wonder, where it would be possible for next versions of VMD to do this
operations for me, by generating separate .pov file with camera, lights
etc., and .inc file with protein itself (favourably with each graphical
representation individually), with the colors, where possible, declared
as variables.
Similar thing is done in pov output of DeepView, although I prefer work
with VMD even at the cost of doing all the above mentioned operations by
myself
:-)

thanks,

Szymon