[Chimera-users] some questions about Chimera

[Elaine Meng]

Hi Ruijie,
I can't exactly answer your questions, but I would note that handling of the COLLADA format (the .dae file you mentioned) varies a lot between different programs.  In our experience, the COLLADA files output by Chimera look good in the Mac Preview app, but not so good in several other programs.

The Chimera scene export formats have limitations, as described in this page:
<http://www.rbvi.ucsf.edu/chimera/docs/UsersGuide/export.html>

For COLLADA specifically,
"The COLLADA export does not support text, silhouettes, or per-model clipping. It has been tested mainly on Macs, with proper rendering observed in Preview (Mac 10.8) and iBooks on iPad. Other applications (e.g. SketchUp and MeshLab tested on Windows) correctly handle the geometry but not the triangle vertex colors."

We haven't tried it in Maya as far as I know.
Elaine
-----
Elaine C. Meng, Ph.D.                       
UCSF Computer Graphics Lab (Chimera team) and Babbitt Lab
Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry
University of California, San Francisco

On Aug 2, 2013, at 8:36 AM, Ruijie Chen wrote:

> Dear Sir / Madam:
> 
> I am a 3D animation student who recently started to making medical animation videos, and I found Chimera is a very usefull tool for building molecules and proteins.
> 
> However, there are few things that I don't understand:
> 
> 1. After I import a .dae file which exported from hemoglobin (PDB: 2hhb), I found that the color I have set for each ribbon is gone, the one I have got inside maya is a hemoglobin molecule with one color. And when I want to select each alpha or beta-globin, I failed to do so because there sometimes have some polygons from other alpha or beta-globin. Is there a way to solve these problems?
> 
> 2. I have tried to export the scene to a .wrl file and convert it to maya file via wrl2ma, but when I open the finish converted maya file it always give me lots of error messages like this :
> "Error: file: C:/Users/**/hemo_ribbon.ma line 116: setAttr: Too much data was provided. The last 173 elements were not used. // "
> and this :"// Error: file: C:/Users/**/hemo_ribbon.ma line 13078: setAttr: Too much data was provided. The last 1193 elements were not used. // "
> Is this a problem which happen during the export process of Chimera or some other reasons?
> 
> Looking forward for your reply
> Thank you
> -- 
> With kind regards
> Ruijie Chen
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