Rendering an Image

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 often 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 Chapter 7 on rendering for a further description of how this works.

Open the Render form and select `Tachyon' from the Render Using menu. Both of the text boxes will be filled with default values which should not need to be changed for the purposes of this tutorial. Press the Start Rendering button. After a few moments of processing, you sould see the message

Info) Rendering complete.

in the VMD text console. If everything worked correctly, you will end up with an image file named plot.dat.tga (on MacOS X or Unix) or plot.dat.bmp (on Windows) in your current working directory. This image is in either Windows BMP or Targa graphics format, and can be read by many programs (such as display, ipaste, xv, Gimp or Photoshop).