Hi Damien,

Check the "subdivision quality" value in the Effects dialog (menu Tools / Viewing Controls / Effects). This controls how faceted the atom spheres and bond cylinders are. The default is 1.5. Higher values give smoother appearance but the rendering can become slow depending on the speed of your graphics card. A value of 10 would be high and 0.1 would be low.

There is another factor that can lead to faceted atom spheres. If you have many atoms shown as spheres then Chimera will reduce the quality of the spheres so that the graphics does not become too slow. The exact rule is that it won't let you use more than 4.5 million triangles for the spheres of one molecule if subdivision quality is at its default value of 1.5. For subdivision quality of 10 it would use up to 30 million triangles (10 x 3 million). A big sphere might use about 450 triangles to look smooth, so at subdivision 1.5 you could go up to 10,000 atoms shown as spheres before quality becomes limited.

Tom

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [Chimera-users] Display at low definition
From: Damien Larivière <damien.lariviere@fourmentinguilbert.org>
To: UCSF Chimera Mailing List <chimera-users@cgl.ucsf.edu>
Date: 12/20/12 10:15 AM

Dear all,

I have a basic question:

In the image below, on the left, the definition of the atoms is quite good, they are perfect spheres.

On the right, they are not anymore. I probably activated something in Chimera, but I'm not able to remember.

May you tell me what to do to get a good definition again?

Many thanks for your help,

Damien
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