Producing sexy ray-traced images

Pardon the title but you'll understand when you see the results!

So, you've got a PDB, loaded it into Pymol and arranged it so that it looks how you'd like - some bits as a cartoon, some as sticks etc. How do you go about making an image that you can then use for a poster, or a paper, or a CPGS/thesis? The answer lies in ray tracing. To get Pymol to actually produce a ray traced image is remarkably easy, just type

ray

in either the viewing window, or the GUI and press enter. After a few seconds (progress is indicated by a bar at the top of the viewing window), you will see the image suddenly change! You could now save this image using

png raytraced.png

BUT you'd quickly find that

• the image quality isn't up to much and so you can't use it in a publication
• it's too small to be used on a poster
• a black background is NEVER a good idea for images you might print for obvious reasons

To resolve these issues, I will now go through the key settings you should ALWAYS have set,

set ray_trace_fog,0
set ray_shadows,0
unset depth_cue
bg_color white
set antialias,2

You may actually want to have shadows in your image, but for anything larger than a small peptide, it can become very distracting.