Hi Aaron, The Mac package manager Homebrew has osmesa. So I just did a quick test of offscreen rendering in ARM Mac ChimeraX daily build and it worked. Here's what I did and the test image I saved is attached. Tom $ brew install mesa $ mkdir ~/Desktop/ChimeraX.app/Contents/lib/python3.11/site-packages/osmesa # Download the __init__.py file from https://github.com/RBVI/ChimeraX/tree/release/v1.4/prereqs/osmesa $ mv ~/Downloads/__init__.py ~/Desktop/ChimeraX.app/Contents/lib/python3.11/site-packages/osmesa $ cp -p /opt/homebrew/Cellar/mesa/24.2.8/lib/libOSMesa.dylib ~/Desktop/ChimeraX.app/Contents/lib/python3.11/site-packages/osmesa $ ~/Desktop/ChimeraX.app/Contents/MacOS/ChimeraX --nogui --offscreen cmd> open 1a0m cmd> save test.png cmd> exit 
On Dec 10, 2024, at 10:36 AM, Tom Goddard <goddard@sonic.net> wrote:
Hi Aaron,
The OpenGL graphics library requires a window to render, so it is not possible to render ChimeraX images without creating a window. But it is fine to have the window iconified. The Linux ChimeraX uses a replacement library for OpenGL called OSMesa (offscreen mesa) which is essentially a version of OpenGL that can work without a window. Back in 2021 I built OSMesa for Intel Mac to render images in nogui mode.
https://github.com/RBVI/ChimeraX/tree/release/v1.4/prereqs/osmesa
If you built libOSMesa.dylib for ARM Mac somehow then you could use that and put it with the osmesa/__init__.py at the above github link in your ChimeraX Python site-packages directory and it would probably be able to render off-screen images if you started ChimeraX with the --offscreen option. I believe OSMesa does not use graphics hardware acceleration, only the CPU so it will be much slower to render images.
Tom
On Dec 10, 2024, at 6:33 AM, aponysbc--- via ChimeraX-users <chimerax-users@cgl.ucsf.edu> wrote:
Hi, I'm trying to generate images in batch with chimerax from terminal on mac m2. When I run "chimerax --nogui --exit --cmd" I get the error: raise LimitationError("Unable to save images because OpenGL rendering is not available") chimerax.core.errors.LimitationError: Unable to save images because OpenGL rendering is not available
ChimeraX command "graphics driver" gives: OpenGL version: 4.1 Metal -88.1 OpenGL renderer: Apple M2 OpenGL vendor: Apple
Is there any way around this? I saw another post about this from 2020 that the nogui option only works on linux with offscreen. Is there any way to save images in batch from terminal?
Thanks, Aaron _______________________________________________ ChimeraX-users mailing list -- chimerax-users@cgl.ucsf.edu To unsubscribe send an email to chimerax-users-leave@cgl.ucsf.edu Archives: https://mail.cgl.ucsf.edu/mailman/archives/list/chimerax-users@cgl.ucsf.edu/
