VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Thu Apr 03 2008 - 00:24:30 CDT

Hi,
  At present, very few of the renderers support the "point" primitive as
an actual 2-D drawing element. One way you can get an image that _looks_
2-D, even though it'll be rendered in 3-D, is to render your scene as VDW,
but create a new material, that has the following settings:
  ambient 1.0
  diffuse 0.0
  specular 0.0
  shininess 0.0
  opacity 1.0

Set your representation to VDW, then select your new material
(or leave it as the default "Opaque", if that's the one you modified...)

On the VMD screen, the molecule will look entirely white...
In order to get the image, use the File->Render menu, and select
either Tachyon or TachyonInternal, and render the image. You can
then get an image that's not 3-D shaded at all. It'll have a lot in
common with the "points" rendering method, though the objects are
space-filling so it won't be exactly the same.

Try that and let me know if this is what you were looking for or not.
If not, I may be able to come up with a couple of other options for you.

Cheers,
  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Tue, Apr 01, 2008 at 02:22:17PM -0500, Dongsheng Zhang wrote:
> John,
>
> Thank you for your reply. My system is 2D, but VDW seems to give me 3D view.
> That is the reason I choose "point". To my understanding, VDW is my only
> choice at this moment. Is it correct? May I use "point" as drawing method,
> but choose other render method? If so, please tell me which one is good to
> save (or transform) the output to an eps file.
>
> All the best!
>
> Dongsheng
>
> On Tue, Apr 1, 2008 at 2:14 PM, John Stone <johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu> wrote:
>
> >
> > Hi,
> > The PostScript renderer in VMD is somewhat antique, and it
> > hasn't been able to keep pace with the rapid advancement of new
> > rendering primitives and shading capabilities provided by OpenGL
> > and the various external renderers. The point primitives are
> > presently "skipped" by the postscript renderer as it doesn't
> > contain PostScript commands to render these primitives at present.
> > I would recommend using the VDW spheres as you're doing presently,
> > as it's not clear to me when we'll have time to revise the
> > PostScript renderer to add support for the point primitives.
> >
> > Cheers,
> > John Stone
> > vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu
> >
> > On Mon, Mar 31, 2008 at 03:51:35PM -0500, Dongsheng Zhang wrote:
> > > Hi VMD-users,
> > >
> > > I used "point" as the drawing method. When I try to render the screen to
> > an
> > > eps file by "rendering using PostScript", I only get the black
> > background.
> > > Is there anything wrong? If I change to another drawing method such as
> > VDW,
> > > it works fine. I am using current version.
> > >
> > > All the best!
> > >
> > > Dongsheng
> >
> > --
> > 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/ <http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/%7Ejohns/>
> > Fax: 217-244-6078
> > 

-- 
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