Hi Lu, Here are few more hints for displaying volume data as opaque planes and also some about movie making. As I mentioned before you want the yellow brightness/transparency curve on the volume dialog histogram to be at the top of the histogram. You also want it to extend all the way from the lowest to the highest data value. If the lowest node of the curve does is not at the lowest data value (left edge of histogram) then data values below that lowest node position will not be shown -- so you will be able to see through the plane at those low data values. You may want to add more nodes to the yellow curve. You do this by holding the ctrl key while clicking with the left mouse button on the histogram. Ctrl-click on an existing node will delete nodes too. There is no Chimera command to step through the planes of a volume that would be helpful for making a movie. But it can be done with a little Python code. I've attached the 2 line Python script planes.py that starts and stops plane display. Here's a Chimera command sequence that would make a movie showing 100 planes: cd /location/of/planes/script ; movie record supersample 3 ; open planes.py ; wait 100 ; open planes.py ; movie stop ; movie encode output planes.mov You may want to turn off depth cueing (dimming far objects) to get a brighter plane display. You can use menu entry Tools / Viewing Controls / Effects and switch off depth cueing. There is not a Chimera command to do that. Again a Python script could do it. Or you can setup your scene including depth cueing turned off, save it as a Chimera session and then open that session before running a movie making script. The latest Chimera has a volume command that can be useful for setting initial thresholds, colors, subregion, ... in scripts. http://www.cgl.ucsf.edu/chimera/docs/UsersGuide/midas/volume.html Tom # ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- # Start or stop volume plane display. Useful for making a movie that steps # through data planes. Example Chimera command sequence to make movie # showing 100 planes. # # cd /location/of/planes/script ; movie record supersample 3 ; open planes.py ; wait 100 ; open planes.py ; movie stop ; movie encode output /tmp/planes.mov # from VolumeViewer.volumedialog import volume_dialog volume_dialog().plane_panel.play_stop_cb()