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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