VMD-L Mailing List
From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Thu Aug 30 2001 - 21:49:52 CDT
- Next message: John Stone: "VMD 1.7.1 pre-alpha, volume visualization, new stereo modes, etc."
- Previous message: Justin Gullingsrud: "Re: memory problems"
- In reply to: Troy Wymore: "Making movies of trajectories"
- Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] [ attachment ]
Dear Troy,
Sorry I haven't gotten to your email yet, I've been swamped
after returning from Siggraph and so on. Here are some answers
for you:
1) To render the snapshots, you either need to have the images
displayed on the VMD graphics window, or if you run VMD in text-mode,
then you can often render much faster since it will skip rendering
into the OpenGL window (since there isn't one :-)
I wasn't sure from your question, if what you're _really_ asking
is "can VMD do the snapshot from the OpenGL back buffer before
it gets displayed on the screen and can be corrupted by mouse
cursors and so on", then the answer is "no", at least not at the
present time. I intend to rewrite a bunch of the "outer loop"
code that manages the process of rendering every VMD frame, which
will have two benefits:
a) Snapshots can be done from the OpenGL back buffer before
glSwapBuffers() is called and the user gets a chance to
mess up the image. (This problem is actually quite system
dependent as it turns out, which is why we didn't do it that
way originally, we never saw the problem on the machines we
originally wrote the code on. I became aware of it a while
back but haven't had an opportunity to bang out the code to
fix this yet, plus, see item b) below).
b) After an outer-loop rewrite, VMD should be able to use
more sophisticated rendering algorithms such as
alpha-blended transparency, multi-pass rendering,
multiple viewports in the graphics window,
accumulation buffer antialiasing, motion blur,
and other features.
2) If you want to generate images that contain shadows, then
my suggestion would be to use one of the supported ray tracing
programs. Recent distributions of VMD have included my Tachyon
ray tracer, so that one is now "built-in" so to speak. Raster3D,
Rayshade, and POV-Ray are also good choices. All of these programs
will generate several image formats, which can be converted to MPEG
animations using free utilities found on the net (the VMD web page
has some links to such information), and they are available for
free. http://www.povray.org/ has a big software collection for
conversion of images to movies.
Once again, sorry for the belated reply, let us know if you have other
questions.
Thanks,
John Stone
vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu
On Thu, Aug 23, 2001 at 02:14:34PM -0400, Troy Wymore wrote:
>
> Hello VMD people,
>
> I am experimenting with a few things in making a movie of a MD trajectory
> and had a few questions.
>
> 1) To render all the snaphsots from a trajectory file, it appears that the
> image must be first displayed in the VMD console. Is there any
> possibility that the image could be rendered BEFORE the display is
> updated? Oh, I'm using the proc "make_trajectory_movie_files".
>
> 2) Any suggestions/reccomendations on which rendering software is best for
> making molecular snapshots and would also contain shadows? The resulting
> files would have to be able to be converted to an mpeg.
>
> Thanks so much,
>
> Troy Wymore
> Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center
>
>
-- 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
- Next message: John Stone: "VMD 1.7.1 pre-alpha, volume visualization, new stereo modes, etc."
- Previous message: Justin Gullingsrud: "Re: memory problems"
- In reply to: Troy Wymore: "Making movies of trajectories"
- Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] [ attachment ]