PyMOLer's
I've made some changes in the development version which I am
considering for the next release. However, they will affect existing
scripts, so I am warning people now, and asking for objections (if there
are any).
*** Subject 1: Ray tracing of lines, dots, mesh, dash, isomesh, ribbon,
and nonbonded representations.
Currently, when you "ray", you have to manually adjust the radius of
these objects for optimum quality. I propose that in version 0.92, that
PyMOL will do this automatically to match the OpenGL image, unless you
explicitly specify otherwise
THIS WILL CHANGE THE OUTPUT OF EXISTING SCRIPTS, but it will be much
easier for users going forward. PyMOL raytracing will be more WYSIWYG
-- what you see in OpenGL will be closer to what you get when you ray
trace.
Prior behavior can be restored by setting the radii explicitly to their
original values.
*** Subject 2: Antialiased rendering
The next version of PyMOL will default to a different antialiasing
algorithm.
In the past, we're used blanket 2X over-sampling of the complete image.
The next version will focus that extra rendering energy where it counts:
on the edges of objects. This turn out to be so much faster that I plan
to make it the default (antialias=1). In most cases, image quality will
improve and rendering times will improve by about 1 to 4-fold for
antialiased images!.
Blanket 2X, 3X, and 4X oversampling will still be possible using
antialias=2, 3, or 4.
Prior behavior can be restored by changing two settings
(ray_oversample_cutoff->0 and antialias->0 or 2).
If you have strong objections to these changes, please speak up.
Cheers,
Warren
--
mailto:war...@delanoscientific.com
Warren L. DeLano, Ph.D.
Principal Scientist
DeLano Scientific LLC
Voice (650)-346-1154
Fax (650)-593-4020
