On Aug 11, 2008, at 12:15 PM, Daniel Wilson wrote:
Dear Elaine,
I realise that there have already been requests about fixing the bug in Chimera for displaying two transparent maps at the same time, so I guess I am just asking whether this is likely to be fixed anytime soon? We are desperate to use this function for a figure for a paper :)
THanks, Daniel
Dr. Daniel N. Wilson
Gene Center Munich Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München Feodor-Lynen-Str. 25 81377 Munich, Germany Hi Daniel,
The incorrect transparency in Chimera when 2 or more models are transparent is very difficult to fix and will not be fixed any time soon. The trouble is that Chimera draws each model separately and it is not possible to correctly handle transparency without intermixing the drawing of parts of models (in depth order). If you use Chimera image saving in the POVray raytracing mode it will correctly show multiple transparent models. The trouble is that this takes a long time to render and adjusting the levels of transparency many times to get the right appearance may be tedious. It would be possible to make a script that combines the currently displayed map surfaces into a single model and hides all the original models so that multimodel transparency would appear correct on-screen. But the combined model would not update when you changed the transparency, color, ... settings of the separate maps. It would require rerunning the script that makes the single model. This would be tedious to use. But if you think it worth trying I can write the script and send it to you. It would not work for transparent molecular models (ribbons and atoms), just surfaces. Tom