Hi Gabe, Fish-eye would be handy for presentation images. I submitted a request for this in 2003 to the Chimera bug/feature tracking system. Unfortunately it has not seen the light of day since. But I make fish-eye images once in while. I've attached one I just made for you as a test looking inside reovirus (1ej6). The trick is to bring up the Chimera Python shell, menu entry Tools / General Controls / IDLE and type a few things:
c = chimera.viewer.camera c.viewDistance 30.0 c.screenWidth 13.0 c.viewDistance = 2
The parameters that control the field of view are "viewDistance" (default 30) and "screenWidth" (default 13). I think view distance means how far your face is from your screen and screen width is how wide the Chimera window is -- maybe the defaults refer to centimeters. The defaults (narrow screen and far view) give a field of view of 25 degrees. Setting viewDistance = 2 gives a field of 150 degrees. Tom
To: Thomas Goddard <goddard@cgl.ucsf.edu> From: Gabriel Lander <glander@scripps.edu> Subject: odd request Date: Fri, 9 Jun 2006 13:03:11 -0700
Hi Thom, The P22 paper I presented at the biophysics conference in Salt Lake City will be published on June 23rd in Science, so when that happens I'll send the movie I made with Chimera your way. We actually got the cover of the issue, and I worked with a graphics artist here at scripps to put it together using his fancy graphics software. One thing that really made the structure very visually striking was the implementation of a fisheye lens. Although this feature is not scientifically very useful, it would be a great artistic addition to Chimera. I have no idea how difficult this would ever be to implement or if it'd be worth it, but it's just a thought. I know you get like a million suggestions a day, so obviously this would go somewhere in the utmost bottom list of things to do. I've attached the mockup we made for the cover to give you an idea of what I'm talking about. Cheers, -gabe
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