[Chimera-users] features/question: stereo3d and volume rendering

[Dougherty, Matthew T]

1) I have been doing S3D animations.  One of things I am realizing is that I need to frequently adjust the interaxial and screen distances.  Sometimes my IA might be 1mm or it might be 23 inches depending on the shot.  Currently chimera does not maintain this camera metadata, so every session I need to reset the values which makes my animations slightly different.  Since rendering can take several hours, one typo can trash the effort.  Any suggestions on a workaround?  There is also a linkage between IA, horizontal field of view, and screen distance, sometimes I think I get caught in a hysteresis loop trying to converge to the desired shot.  As a note, I pretty much stopped using the zoom and have gone to dolly, keeping the scale to one.

2) when doing volume rendering of electron tomograms I am finding it useful to load the same mrc map file in multiple times, such that each model has a different transfer function relating to different densities or structures.  I can currently load seven, but four must be changed from floating point to byte in order to prevent memory lockout thrashing, error messages, etc. Is there a way to load a single map file in and have multiple models and transfer functions for the solid viewing?


Matthew Dougherty
National Center for Macromolecular Imaging
Baylor College of Medicine