Ning's suggestions on how to use GL_RENDER and POVRAY on our SGIs

First thing to do is to put all the relevant programs in your PATH in 0_setup.com (or .cshrc). These are the lines I have in my path:

set path = ($path /xray2/usr/freeware/bin)         for povray
set path = ($path $XTAL_ROOT/raster3D_2.4d)        for raster3D
set path = ($path $XTAL_ROOT/bin)                  for molscript and molscript_2.0
set path = ($path $XTAL_ROOT/pov4grasp-1.31/bin)   for x-pov4grasp

(Editor notes: if you do this in the shell window type "rehash" to make the commands visible. Some of these may already be in your path - use "echo $path" to check). At any time you can check if the programs are "seen" by the shell by typing "which name_of_program". If the shell cannot see the programs, neither will GL_RENDER.

I then create a directory for glr/pov for each figure.

Copy the molscript xxx.in file and the associated pdb file into this directory. Rename the molscript xxx.in file to mol.in (this is just to keep things simple so that you don't have to change too many things in GL_RENDER).

Start GL_RENDER by typing: ~xtal/glr_distr/bin/glr_irix6_n32

Go to 'File'-'Setup Molscript', change the molscript command to molscript_2.0 if your xxx.in file is written for molscript2.0, otherwise, molscript for v1.4.

Go to 'File'-'Setup Povray', change the x-povray command to x-pov4grasp, also add +P after +D, in , choose a picture size you like (around 600x600 is good). '+P' is for povray to pause before exit so that you will have time to take a look at your rendered figure.

Now 'File'-'Run Molscript', you will have a picture now. You can change the background color to white etc. under 'Edit' and 'Image'. Play with it to see the functions.

Now 'File'-'Run Povray(update)', you will start povray and at the end of rendering you should have a x-window displaying the figure. Clicking on that window will make it disappear.

There are many things you can do with your povray setting under 'File'-'Setup Povray' and also you can edit the Material.inc and txtr.inc files (read more povray stuff)

To make a perfect high resolution picture:
povray +Imol.pov +Oxxx.tga +FT +A0.2 +AM2 +J1.0 +H1800 +W1800 >& pov.log &

The +FT option is necessary to write the output file in TARGA format. To view the xxx.tga file, do display xxx.tga. To convert to TIFF, do convert xxx.tga xxx.tiff.

Hints:
if background is white, don't use depthcue for povray rendering, use depthcolor
if background is black, do use depthcue

Povray is only available on xray2, so run GL_RENDER and Povray on xray2. However since all these programs run under Linux, better run them on there since they run far faster on the Pentiums.

That's all. ENJOY!

Addendum: getting this lot to run under Linux

Most of the software is stored under ~xtal. There are links into ~xtal/bin for x-pov4grasp, molscript (v2 only), render, glr_linux. GL_RENDER is called glr_linux under Linux (this should be relatively obvious). If you have ~xtal/bin in your path, then all the programs should be available to you. Povray is in /usr/bin under Linux, and not part of ~xtal.

Addendum: Bobscript and Povscript+

Robert Esnouf created a variant version of Molscript v1.4 called Bobscript, which we have on both the Linux and SGI machines. Bobscript can do additional things to Molscript, although it doesn't have all the v2.0 Molscript functions. We also have Povscript+ if you want to play with this, which can render directly into Povray output format.