On Apr 22, 2010, at 11:13 AM, Thomas Goddard wrote:

Hi Paul,

 Eric Pettersen, another Chimera developer, I believe tested some different POV-ray settings, and Greg Couch has worked on that code a lot.  I don't really know anything about the POV-ray settings because I think I get better results without POV-ray as discussed by Elaine in a previous mailing list message.

http://www.cgl.ucsf.edu/pipermail/chimera-users/2009-June/004030.html

 I'm sending your POV-ray settings question to the mailing list and perhaps Eric or Greg will have suggestions.


Thanks Tom,

The mpeg4 movie with qscale 1 looks pretty good. I forgot to mention in
my first message that I was setting bitrate to 10000, and yet still the
results were fuzzy around the edges. Seems like variable bitrate is the
way to go.

Can you give me any advice on antialias method, depth, threshold
(currently I知 using recursive, 3, 0.3, respectively) or jitter (I知
using true with an amount of 1.0). I致e read the chimera manual entries
on the topics but I知 still confused, can稚 see much difference when I
change variables one at a time. Do you have favorite settings for these
variables? Time to process, as long as it stays within a week for a 1600
frame movie is fine, the product will go out as supplemental material
for a paper, so I知 willing to wait if some change to the settings I知
using now will make a difference.

Hi Paul,
It's been awhile since I fiddled with the POV settings, but I guess I do have two recommendations:

1) Move the antialias threshold back to at least 0.5 -- and I'd suggest using the default 1.0.  In my tests I found no visual difference whatsoever between 0.3 and 0.5 and minimal difference between 0.5 and 1.0, whereas it makes a considerable time difference.

2) Turn off jitter.  As it says in the documentation it looks bad in movies (particularly if you are using text labels).

--Eric

                        Eric Pettersen

                        UCSF Computer Graphics Lab

                        http://www.cgl.ucsf.edu