Hello Bec, Each "rainbow" command is going to spread a single rainbow (or whatever palette you are using) across the whole range of residues that you specify. The color is different for each residue, but if the range of residues is broad, the colors are so similar for adjacent residues you can't see the difference. If you want multiple rainbows across the structure you would need to use the rainbow command multiple times for shorter residue ranges. Example: open 2gbp preset cylinders rainbow :1-10 rainbow :11-20 rainbow :21-30 [... etc. ...] If you just do this you would get only one rainbow spread out over the whole chain: rainbow I hope this helps, Elaine ----- Elaine C. Meng, Ph.D. UCSF Chimera(X) team Resource for Biocomputing, Visualization, and Informatics Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry University of California, San Francisco
On Jul 2, 2025, at 5:00 AM, Rebecca Grace via ChimeraX-users <chimerax-users@cgl.ucsf.edu> wrote:
Hello ChimeraX, Greetings! I've never asked a question, but I need to expedite solving this issue, so thought the time is now. :-) (I should also add, thank you for Chimera and then Chimera X, it has been so beneficial to my research and presentations!)
Several months ago I used rainbow to color a range of residues on my structure. Now I am trying to recreate it on a different model and I can't seem to recapture the detail where every residue is delineated versus a continuous gradation across the selected region. I've searched and read several help emails etc, and maybe if I was a more expert user I would understand this from the usage/help entries about rainbow, but alas, I cannot recreate it. Please let me know how I did this?? Thanks for any help! Cheers, Bec
Here is the past way that I want to recreate: *notice how each residue of tube helix has a separate color whereas the next image has no separations<image.png>
And here is the way I can only seem to get the program to do today:<image.png>