Hi Mikael,
I tried putting a gltf model from ChimeraX 1.1 of PDB 2bna into PowerPoint (current Office 365 version: Version 2009 build 13231.20262) on Windows 10 and colors were faded as you saw due to completely wrong lighting. There is no lighting info in the glTF produced by ChimeraX and apparently PowerPoint chooses ridiculous bright ambient light making the colors nearly white and offers no way to change it other than editing the saved PowerPoint as described in the link you found. I edited the PowerPoint as described. There was one ambient light source and 3 point light sources all too bright. I turned down the brightness and added a black background using 3D Model Format options within PowerPoint and got better colors as shown below, but still not the saturated colors that are in the glTF file.
Here are the powerpoint xml light settings I fiddled with. The color r,g,b values are on a scale of 1000000. Illuminance and intensity are given as a ratio n/d (who knows why, it is powerpoint). I reduced ambient 10 fold and point lights 2-fold. Also the point colors were all not white distorting the colors so I changed those (r,g,b). How the PowerPoint defaults can be so messed up I don't know. After changing those (I used emacs text editor) and reloading in powerpoint you need to rotate the model or it just shows the old lighting apparently having cached an image from before the changes. Still the colors are pastel while the file colors are fully saturated red, blue, yellow and green. Don't know why.
<am3d:ambientLight>
<am3d:clr><a:scrgbClr r="500000" g="500000" b="500000"/></am3d:clr>
<am3d:illuminance n="10000" d="1000000"/>
</am3d:ambientLight>
<am3d:ptLight rad="0">
<am3d:clr><a:scrgbClr r="500000" g="500000" b="500000"/></am3d:clr>
<am3d:intensity n="500000" d="1000000"/>
<am3d:pos x="21959998" y="70920001" z="16344003"/>
</am3d:ptLight>
<am3d:ptLight rad="0">
<am3d:clr><a:scrgbClr r="500000" g="500000" b="500000"/></am3d:clr>
<am3d:intensity n="500000" d="1000000"/>
<am3d:pos x="-37964106" y="51130435" z="57631972"/>
</am3d:ptLight>
<am3d:ptLight rad="0">
<am3d:clr><a:scrgbClr r="500000" g="500000" b="500000"/></am3d:clr>
<am3d:intensity n="500000" d="1000000"/>
<am3d:pos x="-37739122" y="58056624" z="-34769649"/>
</am3d:ptLight>
Tom
2bna in ChimeraX
ChimeraX glTF in PowerPoint
Changed to black background in powerpoint with 3D Model Format options.
Turned down lights and made the lights white.
Hi!
Regards,
Mikael
Hi!
Thank you! It was too easy to save to glb format that I didn’t realize how to do it.
Colors are washed out and I didn’t find any fix to it. I tried some 3d software which come with Windows 10 and tried to save glb file with dimmer colors. Also, I noticed that labels are just flat sheets, if I have them in structure (Can I get floating 2D text which would always face to the viewer?). If someone has easy solution for this colors issue, I would be happy to hear it.
Regards,
Mikael
Hi Oli,
The core glTF format does not support lighting. It also does not specify a background color as far as I can tell, here is the specification
For the washed out colors, one problem we have seen before is that macOS uses a special Apple color profile which is not sRGB and if that is not preserved the colors are faded it. glTF does not appear to have support for color profiles. Another possibility is that the default material in glTF fades the colors. ChimeraX does not export material information into the glTF file. Also glTF can handle camera positions but ChimeraX does not include that.
ChimeraX exports the shapes and vertex colors. It is primarily used to get models into general 3D packages like Blender, Cinema4D, Maya, where the materials, camera angles, lighting model can all be set as needed for the end application.
Despite the many limitations of the glTF format and what ChimeraX puts into it, other formats like OBJ and STL are much more severely limited, neither supports vertex colors that ChimeraX uses. STL does not support any colors, just a list of triangles.
Hi Elaine - I just tried this and it saves as glb, but importing into powerpoint gives washed out colors - it doesn't seem to preserve any lighting options - and the background color is not preserved. I guess this is an issue on Microsoft's end though?
Oli
On Oct 6, 2020, at 10:52 AM, Elaine Meng <meng@cgl.ucsf.edu> wrote:
Hi Mikael,
ChimeraX can save glb, stl, obj, etc. The save formats are listed in the User Guide help page for "save":
<http://rbvi.ucsf.edu/chimerax/docs/user/commands/save.html#formats>
... or you can list them in the Log with command "save formats."
I hope this helps,
Elaine
-----
Elaine C. Meng, Ph.D.
UCSF Chimera(X) team
Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry
University of California, San Francisco
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