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Rendering an Image

This tutorial assumes Raster3D is installed on your system and the executable render is in your path.

Find an interesting view of the molecule from the previous tutorial. Suppose you want to publish this view in a journal and want a high quality image, or you want to make a large poster. Taking the image from a screen capture results in a rather grainy image as the size of the pixels becomes apparent, so you want something with more resolution. There are several programs available which can render a high-quality raster image, based on an input script. VMD has the option to create input scripts for many of these image processing programs, which may then be processed to create a higher quality image of the scene displayed by VMD at the time the script was created. See the section on rendering for a further description of how this works.

Open the Render form and click on the `Raster3D' Output Format. Both of the text boxes will fill with default values and do not need to be changed. Press the Go button. If everything works correctly, a message starting with:

Info 1) Rendering current scene to 'plot.r3d' ...
Info 1) Raster3D file generation finished
Info 1) Executing post-render cmd ' render < %s -sgi %s.rgb; ipaste %s.rgb' ...
 Raster3D V2.4j
will appear in the text console. After a few moments, a window should open with an image similar to the one in the VMD display. This image is in the RGB graphics format and can be read by many programs (such as xv and ipaste).


next up previous contents index
Next: A Quick Animation Up: Tutorials Previous: Viewing a molecule: Myoglobin   Contents   Index
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