This plugin provides a complete solution for managing different structure views within VMD along with its own saved state files.

Creating and Editing Views

Use ViewMaster with VMD as you normally would to create pictures of your molecules. When you have a view you would like to preserve, open the ViewMaster window from the Extensions pulldown menu and press the "Create New" button. A small screenshot of the current graphics will be generated and placed into the ViewMaster window below the main row of buttons. Use the "Create New" button to create as many views as you want. To switch between saved views, click on the snapshot corresponding to the view you want. All the molecular representations you used to create the view, as well as the orientation and most other VMD options, will be restored. To help yourself remember what the different views were for, you can type a note into the Notes entry, just below the buttons and above the saved snapshots. You can have a different note for each view. Recall the clicking a screenshot restores the view. It also selects the view, which is indicated by the circle next to each snapshot. To select a view without restoring the graphics, press the circle instead of the snapshot. The circle next to each view lets you select the view for various operations. The Replace button replaces the selected view with the current VMD graphics. The Duplicate button makes a copy of the view and adds it to the list. The Delete button deletes the selected view.

Session files

ViewMaster automatically saves your views in a file called "viewmaster-session.tcl" in the current working directory. A new copy is saved every time you change your list of views or notes. If you want to avoid overwriting your current list of views with future changes, you can save your current views to a new file with the Save As choice in the ViewMaster File menu. The Set Session File choice lets you change the name of ViewMaster's autosave session file; this change lasts only until you quit VMD. Using Load Views, you can load previously saved views; these will be added to the end of your list. Session files can be loaded just like normal VMD save_state files; for example, if you are working from a Unix command line, "vmd -e viewmaster-session.tcl" will start VMD and load up your most recent set of views from that directory.

Locating molecule data files

ViewMaster tries to keep track of the absolute filename of the files used to create the molecules used in the views you create. When you load a ViewMaster session file, if ViewMaster can't find the molecule files, you will be prompted to either locate the files yourself or skip the files.