Scott,

* Scott Classen <clas...@uclink.berkeley.edu> [2003-02-04 20:08] wrote:
>       I was wondering if anybody has some scene settings for povray that 
> produce nice depth-cued images. In particular I am making figures with 
> a white background and I would like to try povray instead of the built 
> in raytracer of  PyMol, which appears to be quite slow, although it 
> does produce very nice rendered images. I have successfully rendered a 
> myimage.pov file produced from PyMol, but the lighting was very harsh 
> and there was no depth-cueing (fog in povray?). Any help would be 
> greatly appreciated.

I typically use the following script (I call it make_pov.py) and
"run" it from pymol once to load the function, and then I do
"make_pov('povray.inp')" to create the povray.inp file.

Then I edit that file to insert some lines like:

fog { 
  distance 10
  fog_type 2
  fog_alt 10.
  fog_offset -160.
  up <0.,1.,.4>
  colour rgbt<1.0, 1.0, 1.0, 0.1> 
  turbulence 0.8
}

In this case I'm not really doing depth-cueing but adding fog at the
lower background edge (there were two planes defining the background and
a surface below the molecule) rising up towards the front upper edge of
the scene.

"fog_type 2" means a "rising fog" along the "up" vector. fog_type 1 is
a constant fog. To get pure depth cueing, you would want "up" to be along
the <0., 0., 1.> vector (I think!). You'll need to play around with the
distance and fog_offset parameters.

You wouldn't necessarily want the "turbulence" parameter in there
either.

Check out "Atmospheric Effects" in the povray documentation for many
more details:  

    http://www.povray.org/documentation/view/201/

Cheers,
Robert
-- 
Robert L. Campbell, Ph.D.                           r...@post.queensu.ca 
Senior Research Associate                            phone: 613-533-6821
Dept. of Biochemistry, Queen's University,             fax: 613-633-2497
Kingston, ON K7L 3N6  Canada
    PGP Fingerprint: 9B49 3D3F A489 05DC B35C  8E33 F238 A8F5 F635 C0E2
         (out of date web site:http://biophysics.med.jhmi.edu/rlc)

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