[Chimera-users] chimera vrml issues...

[Thomas Goddard]

Janet Iwasa reports problems exporting ribbons and nucleotide renderings
as x3d, problems converting x3d to vrml, and problems with POV and Renderman
output.

	Tom


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Date: Wed, 22 Feb 2006 17:49:33 -0800
From: "Janet Iwasa" <jiwasa at gmail.com>
To: "Thomas Goddard" <goddard at cgl.ucsf.edu>
Subject: Re: chimera vrml issues...

Hi Tom,

Unfortunately, I still ran into a bunch of problems.  The structure I
had was a bunch of ribbons with some colored sphere residues.  When I
exported the scene as x3d and used the vrml converter (which did work
but took forever on my home computer) it only appeared to export the
sphere surfaces, not the ribbon.  I ended up using a different program
(called 'ribbons' - I think I talked to you about it before) to make a
vrml of the ribbon structure.  Then I took the colored spheres and
superimposed it over the ribbon in Maya.  It was pretty time
consuming, but worked in the end.

The structure (which was a nucleosome) also had some nice DNA
representations using the depiction > nucleotide option, and those
didn't seem to get exported to x3d either (could have been a problem
with the x3d -> vrml conversion -- hard for me to tell where things
went wrong).  So I used multiscale models and exported the DNA as VRML
that way, which worked perfectly, as always.

I haven't tested it to see whether the x3d export only works with
spheres or what.  It took the better part of an hour to convert from
x3d to vrml (and this for only 20 or so residues!), so I would love to
find a better solution...

Ideas?  I think I'm pretty much done with that project for the time
being, but it would be really nice to have the scene export stuff
working.  Any clue about what's up with the pov and renderman formats?
 Those may be easier to find converters for.

thanks!  Hope you're doing well,

Janet

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