Hi Elaine, I agree with your advice. I seldom use raytracing to produce publication images. I do always use glossy lighting. Glossy lighting is not enabled by the publication presets as far as I know. It has to be turned on separately in the Lighting panel (Tools / Viewing Controls / Lighting). Tom Elaine Meng wrote:
Dear Fabian, For publication images, to some extent different people will prefer different things. I will describe what I think is important, but keep in mind others may have artistic differences! The User's Guide includes a more comprehensive "image tips" page, also available by clicking the Tips button on the image-saving dialog: <http://www.cgl.ucsf.edu/chimera/docs/UsersGuide/print.html#tips>
It seems like many people think POV-Ray is always the fancier/better option, whereas the Chimera rendering without raytracing only has the advantage of being faster. I disagree. For my own presentation/publication images, I always use the Chimera rendering as I can get much better results that way. This may be due in part to my lack of expertise with POV-Ray, but it is also because there are options only available with the Chimera rendering, and because the shadows from raytracing tend to add to the complexity of an image and make it harder to understand. Of course, the faster turnaround and somewhat more WYSIWYG nature of the Chimera rendering also helps in making nicer images. Most of the Chimera images in the gallery and all currently in the feature highlights page were made directly in Chimera, without raytracing. <http://www.cgl.ucsf.edu/chimera/ImageGallery/> <http://www.cgl.ucsf.edu/chimera/features.html>
For images primarily containing opaque molecular surfaces, I would use Chimera (non-raytraced) rendering with settings: white background, increase molecular surface vertex density to 10, turn off depth cueing, turn on sihouette edges, and either use glossy lighting, or if that is not available on your computer, increase the shininess and brightness parameters.
** If you simply use the publication preset #1 or #2 (see Preset menu) it will do all of the above for you! **
Example image from using publication preset #1 is attached at the bottom of this message. Just now, I also made a page with more images showing the settings being changed individually: <http://www.cgl.ucsf.edu/home/meng/icompare/icompare.html>
However, let's say you have decided to use raytracing because you want shadows. My suggestions for raytracing surfaces would be:
(a) increase molecular surface vertex density to make the surface smoother (b) if white background, make the surface some other color (silhouette edges would better demarcate the boundary, but they are not available with raytracing) (c) for faster rendering increase the POV-Ray Option "antialias threshold" from the default of 0.3 to at least 0.5, but 1.0 or even higher may still look as good and be much faster (d) if shadows are too dark, try decreasing the "key-to-fill" ratio in Lighting. Your shadows look much darker than what I got when raytracing today with the default ratio of 2.0. The default used to be higher, but that was a long time ago (changed before production release 1.2540 July 2008). (e) if shadows are in the wrong place, try moving the "key" light position in Lighting The latter two as well as quick shadow location previewing are mentioned in the raytracing page: <http://www.cgl.ucsf.edu/chimera/docs/UsersGuide/raytracing.html>
I hope this helps, Elaine ----- Elaine C. Meng, Ph.D. meng@cgl.ucsf.edu UCSF Computer Graphics Lab (Chimera team) and Babbitt Lab Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry University of California, San Francisco http://www.cgl.ucsf.edu/home/meng/index.html
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