PyMOL Users, Hooray -- PyMOL's ray tracer can finally do perspective rendering! Why is this such a good thing?
Because (1) ray-traced images are now always "what you see is what you get" (WYSIWYG) versus OpenGL, (2) you can make rendered movies where molecules move around still look right, and (3) it will soon become possible to generate rendered stereo pairs with 'perfect' visual geometry (no more +/- 3 degree nonsense)... However, there is a price to pay: Even though I've beat on the code with Apple's CHUD performance tool, perspective rendering is still 2-5X slower than orthoscopic rendering. That's because there are all kinds of mathematical simplifications one can make in orthoscopic scenes (where all the rays are parallel) that just don't apply to perspective scenes (where all the rays aren't parallel). Regardless, even with perspective turned on, PyMOL's renderer is as fast as PovRay for most basic molecular scenes. Updated beta builds for Windows & Mac at: http://delsci.com/beta http://delsci.com/macbeta NOTE: perspective rendering is now the default in order to exactly match OpenGL geometry. This means that default rendering will seem noticably slower. If you want faster performance, then turn perspective off using "set orthoscopic" before rendering. Cheers, Warren -- Warren L. DeLano, Ph.D. Principal Scientist . DeLano Scientific LLC . 400 Oyster Point Blvd., Suite 213 . South San Francisco, CA 94080 . Biz:(650)-872-0942 Tech:(650)-872-0834 . Fax:(650)-872-0273 Cell:(650)-346-1154 . mailto:war...@delsci.com
