[Chimera-users] hide dust

[Tom Goddard]

Hi Weimin,

As Giovanni pointed out, use the mask command "fullmap true" option to 
avoid getting a smaller masked map.

     http://www.cgl.ucsf.edu/chimera/docs/UsersGuide/midas/mask.html

The reason your contour surfaces don't look good after masking when the 
contour level is set to the same or a close value to that used for 
masking is because the data was set to zero below that contour level.  
The contour surface points are calculated by tri-linear interpolating 
between grid points where data values are higher than the threshold, and 
adjacent grid points that are lower than the threshold level.  If you 
set those lower values all to zero the interpolation gives a much 
nastier looking surface with many staircase artifacts because you many 
different smoothly varying values below the threshold all to the same 
much lower value, namely zero.  To avoid this you should mask at a much 
lower threshold so the neighbor grid points just out side the contour 
levels you really wish to display are not set to zero.  The hide dust 
tool doesn't show these artifacts because it doesn't change the map 
data, it merely undisplays small surface blobs.

     Tom


> Sometimes after we remove the dust using the tool of hiding dust, we
> want to save the map directly instead of using command "mask #0 #0" to
> generate a maskfile. The reason is that the masked map has minimized
> map size and different with original one. Even after we recover the
> map size and origin, it always has half pixel issue, and if we apply
> this mask to original map, the output will have some masking artifact.
> The iso-surface of the output will not be as smooth as original map or
> the map after hiding dust.
>
> weimin
>