I'm going to assume that you turned on shadows in the Effects tool. So we didn't intentionally make it worse. And we do plan to improve it, ticket #7892. Improving it has been on the back burner, because the shadow effect was implemented to preview where shadows would be if you raytraced the image, but I agree that it would be better if they were always better interactively. The quality of shadows in the current implementation varies tremendously depending on how big your window is (1024x1024 is better than 512x512), and which graphics driver you are using -- NVidia graphics drivers currently give better results. So I hope the results you are seeing are because you are using a smaller window or a different graphics driver. If not, please use chimera Help / Report a Bug dialog. Hope this helps, Greg P.S. I've taken the liberity to add you to the cc list on ticket #7892 so you'll be notified when the shadow code is improved. On Fri, 12 Feb 2010, David Bhella wrote:
Hi,
I just updated my Chimera installation to 1.4.1 (Mac OSX aqua), and I noticed that for some reason shadows are not so nicely rendered in standard 3x3 super-sampled output. They look very blocky, much as they always have done in the viewer. In version 1.4 I always got very nice shadows when I saved an image. I am trying to save images of an isosurface view of a 3D reconstruction. Is there a setting I need to adjust to get high quality shadows back again?
Many thanks,
Dave