[Chimera-users] Faster raytracing

[Thomas Goddard]

Hi Berni,

  Elaine's suggestion to change the path to the povray executable in 
Favorites / Preferences, category POV-Ray may work if you don't need 
some extra command arguments to tell it to use multiple cores.

   A couple changes to parameters in the POV-Ray preferences pane can 
also speed up render frames very dramatically (3x or more).  First 
change "Antialias threshold" from 0.3 to 1.5.  That gave a 3x speed-up 
with almost no noticable change in edges (it removes jagged edges). 
Also try reducing quality from 9 to 4 or 5.  See the documentation for 
what you would be missing by doing that:

http://www.cgl.ucsf.edu/chimera/docs/UsersGuide/preferences.html#POV-Ray%20Options

   Also if you are using the Chimera 1.3 production release you might 
want to get a Chimera 1.4 daily build where the transparency handling by 
pov-ray now matches what is on-screen much better.

   Also if you get tonight's daily build or more recent you will not get 
the pov-ray progress dialogs popping up at each frame.  Instead the halt 
button will be on the status line.

   Finally, you might consider some comments on the Chimera mailing list 
from this week which suggest that you can often make a better image 
without using pov-ray.  Better lighting and silhouette edges are 
available in Chimera without pov-ray -- and the main feature of pov-ray, 
shadows, can be more distracting than illuminating

http://www.cgl.ucsf.edu/pipermail/chimera-users/2009-June/004030.html

	Tom


-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [Chimera-users] Faster raytracing
From: Bernhard Pätzold <Berni.Paetzold at gmx.de>
To: chimera-users at cgl.ucsf.edu
Date: 6/25/09 2:26 PM

> Hello
> 
> I love Chimera and the only little bummer to me are the long rendering times for raytraced movies. I managed to get the PovRay version 3.7 which uses multiple cores running on our server. However now I am stuck and here comes my question. 
> 
> Is there away how I can get Chimera to use the newer Version of PovRay? Or can I somehow change my script so that I get only the .pov and .ini files for all the frames while the actual raytracing is skipped and I can do it subsequently with the newer Version?
> 
> Currently the whole things has to happen on a windows system, but I hope that I'll get my ubuntu version soon up and running again, so hints and advices for both options are welcome.
> 
> Thanks a lot in advance
> 
> Berni