[chimerax-users] Showing waters changes lighting

[Elaine Meng]

Hi Daniel,
After showing waters, can you restore the desired appearance with "light soft shad f" or "light full shad f"?  I'm guessing no...

Other guesses are that it's either a graphics bug or some of the waters are extremely far away in the back making the visible scene dimensions change drastically, changing the position of the depth-cueing ramp and other lighting-related calculations.

One reason I thought of scene-depth change is that the silhouettes are shown when the objects are some fraction of the total depth apart, and in your after-water pictures, there are many fewer silhouettes, suggesting the overall depth is now huge.  See "graphics silhouette"
<https://rbvi.ucsf.edu/chimerax/docs/user/commands/graphics.html#silhouettes>

However to really figure it out we would probably need to you use Help... Report a Bug and attach a session that exhibits the problem.

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

> On Dec 18, 2020, at 2:44 PM, Daniel Asarnow <asarnow at msg.ucsf.edu> wrote:
> 
> Hi all,
> I have a few maps and models loaded, which have a couple hundred water molecules. When I display all the waters using 'show :HOH' the lighting changes. It makes "soft" look like "flat" and creates what looks like more ambient reflection in "full" or "simple." I embedded some screenshots below.
> 
> My guess is something about a depth or lighting calculation is affected by all the waters, does anyone recognize what setting would need to change to correct this?
> 
> Soft, shadows false:
> <image.png>
> Same after show :HOH
> <image.png>
> Full, shadows false
> <image.png>
> Same after show :HOH
> <image.png>
> 
> Best,
> -da