On Fri, 18 Jan 2008, Nils Becker wrote:
Hi,
I have been using Chimera for a while and find it great software. Now I am trying to include my own VRML models and show them together with PDB data. I succeeded in opening an externally generated VRML 2.0 file. Since the VRML file contains colored boxes, the standard smooth rendering is not appropriate.
Is there a way to influence the rendering style?
Also, is there a way to switch on a fixed transparency (alpha value) for the whole VRML model, on a per-model basis?
Any help would be appreciated!
Cheers, Nils
First transparency: Currently, the per-model transparency is not exposed to Python, so it can't be modified by the user interface. I will look into how hard that would be to fix. A better solution would be to add support for VRML3, a.k.a., X3D, ColorRGBA nodes. Now rendering styles: VRML lets you specify per-vertex normals for smooth rendering or per-face normals for faceted rendering. So in an IndexedFaceSet, you would set the normalPerVertex field to be FALSE and give a normal for every face. For VRML Boxes, you get faceted rendering only (because a smooth rendering would be a (squashed) Sphere). The VRML specification can be found at <http://www.web3d.org/x3d/specifications/>. Hope this helps, Greg Couch UCSF Computer Graphics Lab