General tips and hints for BALLViewThis page gives hints for BALLView, which do not fit somewhere else...View molecules in 3D stereoBALLView provides two different ways to view molecules in 3D: Stereo with shutter glasses and side-by-side stereo.
Both can be switched on in the menu entry "Display->Stereo".
When BALLView is running in a 3D Stereo modus, users can change the eye distance of the both viewpoints by
using the cursor keys left and right. Left decreases the eye distance and right increases it. The Shift-modifier
boosts the effect of the two keys. The optimal eye distance varies for every person and view, so it must be adjusted manualy.
The amount of the eye distance can also be changed in the Preferences:
![]() The focal distance seems to have no effect on most viewers, so its settings may be removed for future releases of BALLView. Caveat: Since for 3D viewing two seperate images have to be created for every camera movement, the 3D performance can drop to half, while rotating or zooming the view. Consider buying a fast graphics accelerator card if you want use this feature. Shutter glassesTo use shutter glasses with BALLView, you have to use a quad buffered graphics accelerator card.
This has up to now only been tested with a NVIDIA Quadro cards,
but should also work well e.g. with ATI Fire cards. If you make any experiences in this field with
BALLView, please let us know...
Side by sideFor side by side stereo viewing the following hardware is needed:
Visualise hydrogen bondsTo visualise hydrogen bonds, BALLView first has to calculate their position. This can be done, by highlighting a
System and clicking on the menu entry "Tools->Calculate H-bonds" (ALT-N). Then a new Representation for them has
to be created, while using the model "H-Bonds". The result could look like:
![]() Usage of the POV-RAY exportPOV-Ray is an external rendering program which is freely available.
The POV-Ray files which were created by BALLView contain the command line, with which POV-Ray should be invoked to
render the image. This line could look like:
povray +Imy.pov +FN +Omy.pov.png +QR +W1037 +H922 -UVTo use antialiasing in POV-Ray, the flag "+A0.3" can be added. Create animationsBALLView can create fly by animations from the Scene, either for creating on screen presentations of for exporting images, for creation of movies (see below).
All functionality for this feature is called in the menu entry "Display->Animations":
Create movies from picturesTo create movies from a set of images, we suggest useage of the GNU program mencoder,
which is freely available for Linux, MacOS and Windows.
To create an AVI video with 25 frames per second from all PNG images in the current directory with the codec XviD and a bitrate of 1600 kbit/s invoke
mencoder "mf://*.png" -mf fps=25 -o output.avi -ovc xvid -xvidencopts pass=1:bitrate=1600 |