[chimera-dev] Feature request

[Elaine Meng]

Dear Xavier,
Thanks for your kind words!

Unfortunately I can’t report any progress in this area.  We did add a “spring” style, but other than manually calculating coordinates of small spheres and cylinders and then creating them with command “shape”, my only other idea for showing dashed lines as 3D objects via Chimera is to use the “neon” command (not available on Windows).  It has many options and you can even control the lighting, but it is noninteractive and the parameters are mainly specified by parameter files neon.dat and conic.dat.  It can be quite labor-intensive (iterative) to get what you want.  Also, it does not include text labels, ribbons, or molecular surfaces: just spheres, ball-and-stick, sticks, and backbone “tubes.”  I attach an image of the Chimera window and an image made with the command:

neon -o neon.tiff -c conic.dat

with parameter files conic.dat and neon.dat both in the current Chimera working directory.
<http://www.rbvi.ucsf.edu/chimera/docs/UsersGuide/midas/neon.html>
<http://www.rbvi.ucsf.edu/chimera/docs/UsersGuide/midas/neon1.html>

Sorry I don’t have a better answer,
Elaine
-----
Elaine C. Meng, Ph.D.                       
UCSF Computer Graphics Lab (Chimera team) and Babbitt Lab
Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry
University of California, San Francisco

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Chimera window:
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neon.tiff using the settings in neon.dat and conic.dat
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On Aug 1, 2014, at 6:51 AM, F.Xavier Gomis-Rüth <xgrcri at ibmb.csic.es> wrote:

> Dear CHIMERA team,
> I moved from SETOR to CHIMERA for preparing nice protein structure images for publication already some
> time ago and am totally happy. Thre is, however, one single feature that was possible in SETOR but I still miss
> in CHIMERA: to draw pseudobonds as dashed sticks or small spheres. Is it be really not possible to implement
> this nuisance? I known Elaine negatively answered a similar question some time ago within the BB but I would
> herewith strike a blow for it again.
> Best wishes and thanks for maintaining and devloping such a fantastic program,
> Xavier
> -- 
> <fxgr_signanew.jpg>