[chimerax-users] Can we change the lighting gradually in ChimeraX?

[Elaine Meng]

Hi Steve,
Not easily or necessarily smoothly.  Each of those lighting “presets” is a combination of other parameters with certain values, and these parameters can be adjusted with the “lighting” command.

You can see the values in each one by applying it and then just using “lighting” without any keywords, for example commands:

light soft
light
light simple
light

Then the detailed parameters for the soft and simple presets would be shown in the Log.  To even attempt to gradually change between the two, you could try combining “perframe” with “lighting” to gradually change individual parameters (intensity, fill intensity, ambient intensity, number of multishadows), but it would be somewhat arduous.
<http://rbvi.ucsf.edu/chimerax/docs/user/commands/lighting.html>

See perframe, the most analogous example is the one that changes volume contour level:
<http://rbvi.ucsf.edu/chimerax/docs/user/commands/perframe.html>

A simpler approach:
If the scene contents are not moving at all, however, you could just crossfade between an image with light soft and another with light simple (see “movie crossfade” ). I don’t know how good it would look, however.
<http://rbvi.ucsf.edu/chimerax/docs/user/commands/movie.html#crossfade>

I hope this clarifies,
Elaine
-----
Elaine C. Meng, Ph.D.                       
UCSF Chimera(X) team
Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry
University of California, San Francisco

> On Feb 20, 2019, at 2:26 PM, Steve Chou <stevezchou at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Dear ChimeraX team,
> Is it possible to change the lighting gradually in ChimeraX, e.g., from "soft lighting" to "lighting simple"? This sounds weird, but makes sense if we want to change the lighting method in a movie.
> Thanks in advance!
> Steve