- Chimera-users - RBVI Mailing Lists

Chimera movie commands
by Thomas Goddard 16 May '06

16 May '06

Hi Frank, There are currently no Chimera commands for volume surfaces, and there are not commands to control per-model clipping. We wish to add these commands and others so that movie making is more powerful. Currently we are writing a renewal of our major 5-year grant due June 1 so it will probably not be possible for me to add these commands before then. Here is what is available now. There is a command for changing isosurface threshold level. It is part of "Animation commands" on the Chimera experimental features page. http://www.cgl.ucsf.edu/chimera/experimental/experimental.html It is not part of any Chimera distribution but can be downloaded separately and use with your current Chimera. The most practical way to gradually change from a surface to mesh would be to open the model twice, then gradually change the mesh color from completely transparent to opaque, then gradually change the surface from completely opaque to completely transparent. You can't do those two steps simultaneously because Chimera unfortunately does not correctly display two transparent models -- only one at a time. There are no commands to do volume surface color fades. You can do the color fades though using the Chimera animation editor called EMANimator distributed with EMAN. http://ncmi.bcm.tmc.edu/~stevel/EMAN/doc/ Get the latest EMAN distribution (nightly build) because it also is able to move per-model clip planes. To use EMANimator you install EMANimator the use Chimera menu Favorites / Preferences, category tools and add the EMAN chimeraext directory /usr/local/EMAN/chimeraext to the list of locations Chimera looks for extensions in. Here is some documentation I wrote for an older EMANimator version. http://www.cgl.ucsf.edu/chimera/related/emanimator/emanimator.html This is not an entirely trivial tool to use. It lets you create a timeline of transitions and preview them, and record a movie. The drawback is that it only supports a limited set of smooth transitions, mostly related to volume data display. It does not for instance handle 2D labels. Maybe you could add those in an external movie editor. Using EMANimator is a totally separate option from using Movie Recorder and commands. If you want to know all the current Chimera commands with "frame" options that can do transitions it is a short list: http://www.cgl.ucsf.edu/chimera/docs/ContributedSoftware/recorder/moviecomm… Unfortunately our animation tools are quite primitive now and you will need to make compromises if you want to use them. We are proposing to significantly improve animation capabilities in our new grant and will work on it even before then. So feedback about what is important to you is welcome. Tom ------------- > To: Thomas Goddard <goddard(a)cgl.ucsf.edu> > From: Frank Alber <frank(a)salilab.org> > Subject: chimera movie question > Date: Tue, 16 May 2006 17:39:15 -0700 > > Hi Tom, > I have a question about chimera. I need to make some movies with > chimera in which I like to switch on and off different models (using > the volume viewers volume densities) maybe introduce per-model clipping > and add and remove 2d labels during the movie. I figured out how to > rotate scale and move the model around based on command lines commands > that I read in as a file. Also, how to switch the model in the model > panel on and off. > But is it possible to use volume viewer commands on the command line? > So I could use them in a command file? For example switch the > representation of model 1 from surface to mesh. If so, is it possible > to change representations over a number of frames, so that they blur > into each other? Like the 'visibility show frames 100' option in the > 2dlabels command? I couldn't find such options in the manuel but I am > not sure if I looked careful enough. > In case, do you know anybody who I could ask for some cmd files (used > for moviemaking) that actually do similar stuff and which I could look > at as template examples? That would be great starting point to see what > commands could be useful for making movies. > I found an example on the web page, but it didn't have volume viewing > options there. > Thanks a lot! > Frank > > --- > Frank Alber > Andrej Sali Lab > California Institute for Quantitative Biomedical Research > University of California at San Francisco > QB3, Box2552 > 1700 4th Street, Room 501 > San Francisco, CA 94143-2552 (CA 94158 for courier delivery), USA > Phone: +1 (415) 514 4258 > Fax: +1 (415) 514 4231

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proposed "backbone" change
by Eric Pettersen 15 May '06

15 May '06

Hi all, RIght now, if you do "Actions->Atom/Bonds->backbone only" Chimera shows the minimum number of atoms to produce a connected peptide/ nucleic acid backbone, which therefore does not include peptide carbonyl oxygens nor nucleic sugar rings/charged phosphate oxygens. We are thinking of changing the behavior so that "backbone only" includes everything that isn't in the side chain/base. The question is: does anyone need/want the current behavior? If not, I'd not only change "backbone only" but would also change Select->Structure- >backbone from a menu (has "full" and "minimal" in it) to just a menu item that selects the full backbone. If there are some people who do use the current behavior, then instead I'd change "backbone only" to be a menu too. --Eric Eric Pettersen UCSF Computer Graphics Lab pett(a)cgl.ucsf.edu http://www.cgl.ucsf.edu

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Non-gui chimera in a shell?
by James Vincent 09 May '06

09 May '06

Hello, I've read several threads about nongui use of chimera and that some work was started. This work seemed mainly aimed at getting a web server script to run chimera and return some result back to a browser. I'm interested in running chimera in a stand alone python script. I'd like to do molecular calculations using the various tools but all on a command line, no graphics. It seems the --nogui option would get this, but the OS X version does not seem to implement that. Perhaps I'm missing something. Can anyone help? ideally I'd like to just have a plain python script that imports the chimera package but does not choke on all the graphics stuff, and then lets me use the chimera object model and other programming objects. Thanks for any assistance, Jim ---- James J. Vincent, Ph.D. National Cancer Institute National Institutes of Health Molecular Modeling and Bioinformatics Section Laboratory of Molecular Biology Building 37, Room 5120 37 Convent Drive, MSC 4264 Bethesda, MD 20892 USA 301-451-8755 jjv5(a)nih.gov

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manual
by Oscar Moran 08 May '06

08 May '06

does exists a printable version of the manual? (pdf, ps or even simple ascii) oscar Oscar Moran, PhSc Istituto di Biofisica Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche Via DeMarini, 6 I-16149 Genova, Italy Tel. +39-0106475-558 / 522 Fax +39-0106475-500

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transparency at the command line
by Miguel Ortiz-Lombardia 07 May '06

07 May '06

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Hi chimerics, I'm not very familiar (yet) to python scripting in chimera, so I am trying to prepare a movie using just line commands in a file. I would like to gradually increase the transparency of a model's surface that has been colored in "rainbow by residue" style. My question is then: is there a way to control the overall transparency of a surface from the command line? I could resort to colordef commands at every step, but this would make things very hard with the rainbow coloring... Thanks a lot! Miguel ( trying to learn more python in the meantime ;) ) - -- Miguel Ortiz Lombardía Centro de Investigaciones Oncológicas C/ Melchor Fernández Almagro, 3 28029 Madrid, Spain Tel. +34 912 246 900 Fax. +34 912 246 976 e-mail: molatwork(a)yahoo.es - ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Et ainsi ne pouvant faire que ce qui est juste fût fort, on a fait que ce qui est fort fût juste. Blaise Pascal, Pensées -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.1 (Darwin) iD8DBQFEXaezF6oOrDvhbQIRAnUNAJ9UJOF3RWv7ohXj+pcmQeD6rU4VBwCfb7PK PDzmG1mMWWL6iW9o+a+ooXk= =Flu6 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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B-factors
by Narender Singh Maan 05 May '06

05 May '06

Dear Chimera users, i am looking for a way to write down the average B-factors for each residue from a pdb file (which shows atomic bfactors). I tried using chimera attributes which can color the protein and shows a histogram for bfactors, but i am not able to get those average values in reply log or some other written file. Please let me know if i can get any help in this. thanxs ns

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Chimera under KDE (update)
by Mingfeng Yang 05 May '06

05 May '06

Please disregard my previous message. I just tried to kill the KDE system process one by one and found out that skim (an input program) is the one should be blamed. Mingfeng

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Can't input anything under KDE
by Mingfeng Yang 05 May '06

05 May '06

I am using Chimera build 2199 under KDE 3.5.2, and I can't input anything into the command line (and other input dialogs) of chimera. The linux distribution is Kubuntu Dapper Drake. If I get into the KDE environment with failsafe mode, everything is fine. And I remember chimera works fine under KDE 3.5.2 under gentoo. I guess some service(s) of KDE must have confliction with chimera, but I couldn't figure out which one. :( Best, Mingfeng

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absolute scale?
by Cathy Lawson 02 May '06

02 May '06

Hi, Is there a way to set an "absolute scale" for viewing in chimera? I'm trying to make pictures in multiple Chimera sessions with different molecules and would like for the results to be all on the same scale. I naively thought I could do this with the "camera" scale but then I noticed that for two different sessions where this value was set to 1.0, the actual scales are quite different. Chimera help revealed that the camera scale is relative to the original size when the model was first opened. Any suggestions would be appreciated! thanks, Cathy Lawson *********************************************************************** Catherine L. Lawson Laboratory for Structural Biology and Bioinformatics Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology Rutgers University 610 Taylor Road, Piscataway, NJ 08854 cathy.lawson(a)rutgers.edu tel 732 445 8074 fax 732 445 5312 http://rutchem.rutgers.edu/~lawson http://roma.rutgers.edu/~lsbb *********************************************************************

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Broken labels!
by Changhoon Kim 02 May '06

02 May '06

Hello? I am using Chimera on Windows XP. It's "beta version 1 build 2199 2006/01/24". When I tried to display residue labels, many of the labels were unrecognizable. I've attached the picture showing the broken labels. Sometimes the distance labels are also unrecognizable. I hope it would be fixed soon. Regards Changhoon Kim

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