re: [PyMOL] Fancy images

Hi Robert,
To do that, you'll need to become moderately well acquainted with
working with a POVRay scene file.

It sounds like what you're thinking of would be covered by the "plane"
object in POVRay. As described in the POVRay manual, planes are
defined as follows

#begin plane definition
plane { <0, 1, 0>, -1
    pigment {color orange}
  }

This defines an infinite plane (great for a background) that's colored
orange. The vector <0,1,0> (in the format <x,y,z>) is the surface normal
of the plane (i.e. if we were standing on the surface, the normal points
straight up along the y axis). The number after the vector definition is the
distance that the plane is displaced along the normal from the
origin -- in this case, the floor is placed at y=-1 so that a sphere
at y=1, radius=2, would be resting on it.

What you'll need to do is have PyMOL output your scene file, figure
out where the boundaries of your molecule are, then displace a plane
away from the origin both far enough that it doesn't clip into the molecule
and in the right direction, such that your light source causes the shadow
of your molecule to fall upon the plane.

I hope I was able to be of some help.

Jacob

  
RC> Hi,

RC> Someone posed a question to me that I couldn't answer, so I'm turning to
RC> the collective wisdom here for help.

RC> How does one create one of those fancy journal-cover images in which,
RC> say, a structure is superimposed on some other image as a background,
RC> but in which a shadow is cast on the background. There is a simple image
RC> of this sort on the opening page of the pymol gallery, so I figure this
RC> must be possible and that perhaps Warren himself knows. :)

RC> I assume that this might be a povray method, so I figured out that if do
RC> something like:

RC>         (header,data) = cmd.get_povray()
RC>         file=open('povray.dat','w')
RC>         file.write(header)
RC>         file.write(data)
RC>         file.close()

RC> then I have a povray input file that I can render.

RC> Does anybody have a recipe for adding a background image using povray?
RC> Or is there another, better way?

RC> Cheers,
RC> Rob...@li...