VMD User's Guide

Figure 4.10: The Material Formsliders at the bottom of the form. All materials in the materials browser, including those youcreate, will appear in the Material pulldown menu in the Graphics form.To experiment with the material settings, first create a new material so that you can edit itsvalues. Next, load any molecule, change its drawing method to VDW representation, and using theMaterial pulldown menu in the Graphics form, change the representation’s material to the materialyou just created. Now, go back to the Materials form, highlight the new material in the browser,and change some of the values in the sliders. The effect of changing shininess should be especiallydramatic.4.4.11 Render FormThis form is used to export the currently displayed graphics scene to an image file or to a geometricscene description file suitable for use by one of several external renderers, which can produce afinal image. The supported rendering packages are listed in table 7.1. See Chapter 7 for detailedinformation on how rendering is performed using external programs, as well as information on 3-Dprinting and other uses of the exported scene description files.The rendering process works in two stages. The first stage exports the displayed VMD sceneto a text or image file in the selected format. The second (optional) stage renders the exportedfile, potentially displaying the results when complete. The exported file is named in the Filenamefield; a default name is given when a new format is selected, so it is best to hold off entering thefilename until after the file format is selected. Another way to select the filename is available bypressing the Browse button, which opens up a file browser. Pressing the Start Rendering buttonwrites the data file. After that, the Render Command is executed. The default command shouldstart the appropriate rendering program if it is available.Some of the rendering commands have been set to call a display program on the rendered imagewhen it is completed. VMD will wait for the display program to finish, which causes VMD to freezeuntil the display program closes, so you may want to run the job in the background. This can bedone (on Unix) by enclosing the existing text with ()’s and putting an & at the end. For example,47