[Chimera-users] Visualisation in Headless Chimera

[Elaine Meng]

Hi James,
In my experience, i get much better images just using Chimera rendering, not POVray.  If you want shadows you can turn them on directly in Chimera (e.g. command: set shadows), and some Chimera settings are not relevant to POVray (silhouette edges, etc.).
<http://www.rbvi.ucsf.edu/chimera/docs/UsersGuide/print.html#tips>

However, if you really want to use it, you can set POV-Ray Options in the Preferences, save the preferences, and then copy that preferences file to the headless machine.  Still this is only a small subset of the things one could possibly change in povray, so if you’re a POVray expert you could fiddle with the POVray conf file (see Chimera Log for where this would be), and possibly re-run povray directly using the Chimera-generated .ini and .pov files (from the “copy” command with “raytrace”).
<http://www.rbvi.ucsf.edu/chimera/docs/UsersGuide/midas/copy.html>

I hope this helps,
Elaine
-----
Elaine C. Meng, Ph.D.
UCSF Chimera(X) team
Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry
University of California, San Francisco

> On Apr 1, 2019, at 2:58 AM, James Starlight <jmsstarlight at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> P.S. could you also suggest me how it would be possible to change
> pov-ray options working in Headless Chimera?
> 
> I am using it with a simple script:
> 
> # make visualisation of b-factors
> rangecolor bfactor 2 dark red 20 firebrick 40 orange red 60 orange 100 yellow
> 
> # make a png immage
> copy file ${output}/structure/${pdb_name}.png png width 800 height 600
> supersample 4 raytrace rtwait" > "${temp}/chimera.${pdb_name}.com"
> 
> As the result I have an image with the alpha channel (although I
> indicated not to use it in my session via
> chimera-headless ${pdb} script.com --nobgopacity
> 
> finally I would like to change some rendeting options using the same
> scripting work-flow like "Quality",  "Antialias depth"  etc