[Chimera-users] animating "HIDE DUST"

[Thomas Goddard]

Hi Matt,

   I assume you mean you want the "dust" to gradually fade out instead 
of disappear all of a sudden.  I see 3 possible approaches.

   Most practical: open the two copies of the density map and make two 
identical surfaces, hide dust on one of them, then fade the other one by 
making it gradually more transparent (surftransparency command).  Not 
sure if this will look good or if the non-dust where the transparent and 
non-transparent surface coincide will look weird.

   General solution requiring new code.  Would be neat if the Chimera 
movie command could do cross-fades between two successive frames. 
Basically you would show the surface with dust, then use "movie fade 
frames 25", then the next command would hide the dust.  The movie 
command would simply take the image from before the fade command and the 
frame drawn immediately after and blend them linearly for a specified 
number images.  Would be not too hard to implement and would enable 
doing all kinds of cross-fades.

   Specific solution requiring new code.  The current hide dust turns of 
display of the surface triangles making up the dust.  A modified version 
of that could instead change the color transparency of the dust.  There 
is no command for hide dust (just a dialog) and this new command would 
probably be an option to the "sop" (surface operation) command.

   I'm interested in implementing both of the above coding solutions but 
have many other things to work on.  I'll add those ideas to the Chimera 
request list.

	Tom




> Hi,
>
> I was trying to generate an animation transition using the HIDE DUST feature.  Any suggestions on how to do it (e.g., chimera command, python, etc)?
>
> thanks, Matt
>