Hi Dan, Glad you liked Chimera glossy lighting. It is computing the lighting at each pixel instead of at each surface vertex. It also improves the appearance of transparent surfaces. A patch of surface viewed nearly edge on appears more opaque then a face on patch because you are looking through a thicker section. The normal lighting does not make this correction. It makes the transparent surfaces look more 3 dimensional. A few other rendering quality improvements are in Chimera 1.4. Silhouette edges now work with transparent surfaces. And there is a one-layer transparency option that shows only the front-most layer of a transparent surface. This allows models underneath to be seen (e.g. a molecular model) without the confusing overlaps of parts of the surface in the back showing. This is on by default for molecular surfaces (Actions / Surface / show) and is an option in volume data surfaces under the surface and mesh options panel in the volume dialog (default off). Interactive ambient occlusion lighting is hard, though definitely useful. For special images you can sometimes fake it in Chimera as described here: http://www.cgl.ucsf.edu/chimera/tutorials/volumetour/volumetour.html#ambient Different surface inside and outside colors is on our request list, item 131, since feb 2008. http://plato.cgl.ucsf.edu/trac/chimera/wiki/requests Would be nice. Not too hard, but also it seems of value in limited circumstances since most clipped surfaces are "capped" i.e. the hole created by clipping is covered so the object appears solid, so the inside is not visible. Tom -------- Original Message -------- Subject: [Chimera-users] lighting in Chimera From: Dan Gurnon To: chimera-users Date: 11/16/09 10:26 AM
I wanted to tell you all that I love the new "glossy lighting" feature- now its easy to see the difference between the inside and outside of a surface when you use the per-model clipping tool. Without it, I had a hard time getting a sense of depth when a surface was clipped. But with the improvement glossy lighting brings, I have begun to wonder if other improvements in coloring and lighting are in the works or are possible. For instance, I use radial coloring with a grey palette to help my students pick out tunnels and pockets in a surface, but a better method would ambient occlusion on-the-fly. I've seen it in the molvis program "Qutemol", though the program does little else. Alternatively, is it possible to change the quality of shadows enabled in the effects window? And on a separate note, is it possible to change the inside color of a surface (something like "ribinsidecolor" for surfaces?) Thanks Dan
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Daniel Gurnon, Ph. D. Assistant Professor of Chemistry DePauw University Greencastle, IN 46135