Hi,

I am a relative newbie to POVRay - I use it only for rendering high
quality pictures and Quicktime movies of molecular models of proteins
for publication and have not had to delve too deep into understanding
what was going on (ie the POV files are automatically generated and only
need minor lighting modifications) - but I have come across a problem
that you might (please!) be able to help me with...[Without resorting to
obscene flattery, you guys seem to know what your talking about...] 

Swiss-PDB outputs molecular surfaces as a series of smooth triangles
(these are big include files (eg 12Mb)), which produces a very nice
surface apart from the coloration, which ends up highly pixelated. This
seems to be due to the fact that normal triangles can only be of one
colour, rather than each vertex having its own. I realise that Chris
Colefax's TriColor macro allows for the creation of triangles with
individually coloured vertices, but this doesn't really help me, as the
surface is already created.

Is there anyway that I could convert this surface to
coloured_smooth_triangles (and averaging the colours which are currently
assigned to each triangle over the surface to give a reasonable blend)
or is this asking the impossible? A direct output from SwissPDB to a
pict file produces good colour gradation over the surface, but clearly
isn't up to raytracing quality, and doesn't allow me to produces
Quicktime clock rotations either...

An example of the results I'm getting can be found here: 
http://www.ams.rdg.ac.uk/pictures/models/Protease1povray.jpg

and a low quality direct output from SwissPDB can be found here:
http://www.ams.rdg.ac.uk/pictures/models/Protease1direct.jpg

Anyway, apologies for the length of this message, any suggestions???


Thanks 

Fred.

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In article <37D9264D.484D37BA@rdg.ac.uk> , Fred <sas### [at] rdgacuk>  wrote:

> Is there anyway that I could convert this surface to
> coloured_smooth_triangles (and averaging the colours which are currently
> assigned to each triangle over the surface to give a reasonable blend)
> or is this asking the impossible? A direct output from SwissPDB to a
> pict file produces good colour gradation over the surface, but clearly
> isn't up to raytracing quality, and doesn't allow me to produces
> Quicktime clock rotations either...

I am not aware of a "coloured_smooth_triangles" object in POV-Ray 3.1. Are
you referring to some unofficial compile?


    Thorsten


____________________________________________________
Thorsten Froehlich
e-mail: mac### [at] povrayorg

I am a member of the POV-Ray Team.
Visit POV-Ray on the web: http://mac.povray.org

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Thorsten Froehlich wrote:

> I am not aware of a "coloured_smooth_triangles" object in POV-Ray 3.1. Are
> you referring to some unofficial compile?
> 
>     Thorsten


I was referring to an option provided by Chris Colefax's TriColor Macro
(Now updated to the Triangle Mapping macro -
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Lakes/1434) which allowed
'per-vertex' colouring of triangles... this macro created 
coloured_smooth_triangle objects...the new version seems to create
'cv_triangles' and 'cv_smooth_triangles' instead (see attached .zip).


Fred.

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Attachments:
Download 'trimap.zip' (3 KB)

In article <37DCC232.493E9614@rdg.ac.uk> , Fred <sas### [at] rdgacuk>  wrote:

> I was referring to an option provided by Chris Colefax's TriColor Macro
> (Now updated to the Triangle Mapping macro -
> http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Lakes/1434) which allowed
> 'per-vertex' colouring of triangles... this macro created
> coloured_smooth_triangle objects...the new version seems to create

Ah, I see. I think it is a misunderstanding of what is a macro and what is
an object. Macros are something like functions (in POV-Ray) that can
generate scene parts from abstract algorithms. This is what the TriColor
macro does. It generates triangles and puts them into a mesh object, and the
mesh object is a POV-Ray scene object.
Usually third party applications that export to POV-Ray do not output
anything else then plain POV-Ray scenes.
I am not aware of any program that can do the conversion you need
automatically. If there would be such a program it could probably do all
steps (meaning that you wouldn't need the TriColor macro at all) and output
a new scene file. Sorry!


    Thorsten


____________________________________________________
Thorsten Froehlich, Duisburg, Germany
e-mail: tho### [at] trfde

Visit POV-Ray on the web: http://mac.povray.org

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That's pretty much what I thought, but thanks anyway...

Fred

Thorsten Froehlich wrote:
> 
> In article <37DCC232.493E9614@rdg.ac.uk> , Fred <sas### [at] rdgacuk>  wrote:
> 
> > I was referring to an option provided by Chris Colefax's TriColor Macro
> > (Now updated to the Triangle Mapping macro -
> > http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Lakes/1434) which allowed
> > 'per-vertex' colouring of triangles... this macro created
> > coloured_smooth_triangle objects...the new version seems to create
> 
> Ah, I see. I think it is a misunderstanding of what is a macro and what is
> an object. Macros are something like functions (in POV-Ray) that can
> generate scene parts from abstract algorithms. This is what the TriColor
> macro does. It generates triangles and puts them into a mesh object, and the
> mesh object is a POV-Ray scene object.
> Usually third party applications that export to POV-Ray do not output
> anything else then plain POV-Ray scenes.
> I am not aware of any program that can do the conversion you need
> automatically. If there would be such a program it could probably do all
> steps (meaning that you wouldn't need the TriColor macro at all) and output
> a new scene file. Sorry!
> 
>     Thorsten
> 
> ____________________________________________________
> Thorsten Froehlich, Duisburg, Germany
> e-mail: tho### [at] trfde
> 
> Visit POV-Ray on the web: http://mac.povray.org

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