Subject: Re: CCL:animation

From: Eugene Leitl <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 7 Jun 1997 14:33:23 +0200 (MET DST)

For those of you interested in rendering high-quality movies, I can
recommend PovRay, a highly sophisticated public domain renderer (there is
a usenet newsgroup on it out there). I know there are several conversion
filters, e.g. pdb->pov for itaround. In a Unix environment, one would most
likely use pipes, or a batch soldering individual frames into a movie. 

Regards,
Eugene Leitl

---

From: Rick Venable <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 7 Jun 1997 15:30:08 -0400 (EDT)

> likely use pipes, or a batch soldering individual frames into a movie. 

There's also a web site at      http://www.povray.org

The new version, povray3, has many improvements, including orthographic
projection and several internal changes to increase rendering efficiency. 
If you tried PovRay over a year ago and thought that it was too slow for
animation, I'd suggest trying it again.  You can also use the features of
PovRay to make animations based on a single coordinate set, e.g.
rotations, pans and zooms, lighting changes, etc.  

A caveat about pdb2pov-- it creates one or two large compound objects
using the constructive solid geometry (CSG) feature of PovRay; this
defeats most of the new changes for efficiency, which in general apply
divide-and-conquer approaches based on the number of objects and their
distribution in space.  Removing the CSG statements (e.g. merge or union) 
results in 50-fold decreases in rendering time for scenes with a few
thousand atoms.  I modified the copy of pdb2pov at our local site to avoid
the use of CSG in the output .pov files.  I've forwarded this information
to the author of pdb2pov, who is working on a new version (as time
allows).

Like any programming language, it takes a little time to learn how to make
the best use of PovRay.  However, the documentation is available in HTML
format and is very good for a public domain program.  The results are also
well worth the effort; PovRay has many pre-defined textures (e.g. glass,
stone, wood, ...) and other features that can be used to produce
journal-cover quality molecular images.

--
Rick Venable                  =====\     |=|    "Eschew Obfuscation"
FDA/CBER Biophysics Lab       |____/     |=|
Bethesda, MD  U.S.A.          |   \    / |=|  ( Not an official statement or
[email-masked]  |    \  /  |=|    position of the FDA; for that,
http://nmr1.cber.nih.gov/           \/   |=|    see   http://www.fda.gov  )