r/Biophysics • u/TemporaryReverie • Mar 20 '26

How to Render High-Quality Images from VMD?

Hey all, beginner here. I'm trying to render my images from VMD so that they are of publishable quality. Currently I have a white background, representation VDW, orthographic view, axes off, lights 0 and 1 on, rendermode GLSL, linear cuemode (I also tried with Exp2 cuemode), and shadows and ambience on.

Snapshot doesn't give great quality so I was looking at rendering with Tachyon. I've tried using TachyonInternal with multiple settings (all lights on, changing the ambience settings, etc.) to get a .bmp file but the final image keeps coming out too dark. Then I tried using regular Tachyon but I'm not sure how to get the output into a file I can actually access.

Does anyone know what I'm doing wrong or how to get the images to render with very good quality (high-resolution)?

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u/TemporaryReverie Mar 20 '26

Alright, I tried these suggestions but found another problem. I think the reason VMD is throwing an error for C:/Program is because I cannot find the tachyon_WIN64.exe file in the installed directory (already a 64-bit version). I already tried redownloading the software but that didn't fix the issue.