This is for the povray gurus out there... Occasionally I muck around with the time-consuming practice of trying to map pictures onto molecular surfaces with povray.
I had this working to some extent, but something has changed (I think with the povray file format produced by pymol & make_pov where now there are fancy texture_list texture and pigment statements, rather than simple "pigment" ones.) In the past, I set it up so that the povray file has a header (cameras, lights, etc.) separate from the molecular scene description. Then I would usually edit the header to apply some #default texture or pigment to use the povray parlance. So the approach I used to use was to strip out all the pigment {} statements from the molecular scene descriptor povray input with a perl script, and then use the #default pigment {image_map{ " mypicturehere.gif" }} syntax in the header to map the image on to the surface...the practical uses of having a picture of someone, say, snowboarding down a mountain mapped onto the surface of some kinase are just endless. But that aside, the problem now is that these newer texture_list statements aren't so amenable to this global pigment removal thing, and I haven't quite figured out how best to get around this. (Couldn't remove them entirely and putting in the image_map pigment thing didn't seem to work, although maybe I just didn't get the right combination of open and closed brackets {?}}}) Anyone have any experiences along these lines? As near as I can tell, there was some switch in smooth triangle definitions with Povray 3.5 which was capitalized on by some pymol 0.98 edition. Perhaps I have to go back to an old archived version of pymol? Or, more sensibly, perhaps I should recognize that pictures of easter bunnies or whatever don't belong on some wood-textured rendition of a half-submerged albumin, glowing softly in the warm light(s) of a double sunset over an infinite lake lapping at the shores of a checkered beach. But for some reason journal editors seem to enjoy this. Thanks, Seth