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Feb. 03, 2001  Little news to tell I'm still alive and also very busy - but who cares ?     Minor changes of the website design (graphics and internal stuffs). The new Gallery section will be filled when I'll have time... Well, don't know when.  I guess most of the benchmarks in the grasp_surface examples page are up to date now. Also you may have noticed new entries on this page that were already online last year.  Nov. 14, 2000  Added a new item in the Tutorial section to help producing GRASP surfaces of better quality.  Oct. 12, 2000  Pov4Grasp 1.31 - New enhancements  Added a persistent option to the grasp_surface object for use in "rigid-body" animations (translate/rotate/scaling). Object data, including any property, are parsed only once at the beginning of the animation. Useful for big surfaces and long animations. Note this is a very limited feature derived from the MegaPOVweb  code. An example page will be available soon. Meanwhile, check the text document to know the current limitations.  Added a fog_start keyword to replace fog_offset that was defining a starting offset from the camera in constant fog. Now this feature also works for ground fog where the previous keyword has a different meaning. For more details, please visit the updated page.  Fixed a missing test for removing vista buffer when using camera motion blur. This is now compatible with focal blur behaviour while the effect is negligible.  This will be the last Pov4Grasp update for a while since I'm currently writing my thesis. I won't have time even to correct bugs, but you're welcome to do if you find ones    Happy Pov4grasp'ing !  Sep. 22, 2000  A few sections of this site are under reconstruction/updating so you may have trouble surfing for a couple of days. I'm preparing the next version of Pov4Grasp which will be released soon (minor upgrade).  I was at the Understanding Protein Electrostatics conference in Stockholm (Sep. 15-18) and had a nice discussion with Ansgar Philippsen (author of the cool DINO softwareweb  ) about a possible GRASP surface support in DINO. If implemented, it would actually lead to an indirect support for MSMSweb  surface files in Pov4Grasp. MSMS produces much better quality surfaces than any other software around. Also the molecular structures written by DINO could use a GRASP format. I hope it's on the way !  Aug. 01, 2000  Added Bzip2web  distributions of Pov4Grasp in the Download section. The source archive is much smaller compared to gzip compression; executables are almost the same size (could be compressed more through the RAR archiver, but it's $hareware and not available for any UNIX-flavour). Bzip2 is distributed under a BSD-style license.  If you experience downloading problems with any version, you are welcome to drop me a line so I'll try to fix it.  Jul. 12, 2000  This site has moved to a new server. Please note its new URL: http://pov4grasp.free.fr. The previous server (  Alternweb  ) had technical problems for about one month, and finally stopped free web hosting due to a french law, voted in late June 2000, which requires every webmaster to be identified. This new server has support for PHP3, so I've finally migrated from PHP/FI     Pov4Grasp 1.3 - grasp_surface enhancements  Added a preview mode to save parsing time and memory for big molecular surfaces. It is based on a crude mesh simplification method and should not be used for final rendering. Preview level 1 to 4 may be set depending on the surface complexity. See the grasp_surface examples and benchmarks page for overview.  Added a smooth flag to make the surface triangles smooth or flat. May be used mainly in preview mode.  Worked again on the object syntax. I hope it is "fully relaxed" now, say it allows to write options in any order and gives warnings instead of errors. gradient and colors_file should replace the with sub-option, which is now devoted to template surface calls.  Direct filter and transmit statements are now available for every properties. Don't use with a gradient definition as it may be ambiguous.  See the updated tutorials section and features page for more details.  Grasp2pov 2.2a - Minor fix  The mesh2 block has been removed when invoquing -megapov command-line switch.  Jun. 21, 2000  This is Summer Day - and in France, also the "Music Day"     Ooops ! I've fixed a broken link for the source distribution of Pov4Grasp. Sorry...  Some other links (as the 2 images given in old news below) may be "forbidden". For now I can't correct this due to server setup.  Jun. 16, 2000  Back to the new server again ! (seems not yet stable)  A new tutorial section is open.  Pov4Grasp 1.22 - grasp_surface bug fixes and enhancements  The object syntax now accepts several spellings in its property names. For instance, discretecolors should replace the ambiguous vertexcolor name.  This discretecolors property has been improved. Object transparency is now available for this property through dedicated filter and/or transmit statements. Fixed misreading of the optional color description file (defcol.dat), whose RGB components are actually inverted. Filter and transmit values can be manually assigned to any color of this file and will supersede the object transparency if defined.  Changed again the texture handling so that a property will never be overlayed by other textures. This now behaves as standard mesh where each triangle has its own texture definition.  A new verbose option must be used to display useful messages while parsing the object. The default is verbose off since standard POV-Ray objects give only warning or error messages, so you may add this option to get the same behaviour as previous releases. Note this is different from the +V command line option.  See the features page for details on these changes.  Grasp2pov 2.2 - Continuing...  Output mesh statement has been removed for better control of the object textures. Now you have to #include the file within either mesh or union block.  Added a MegaPOV support (0.3 or later) called by the -megapov option. The file must be included within the mesh2 object only. It seems that there's a MegaPov problem when the object is rotated or translated, textures don't follow the move. See the README file for details.  The -vertexcolor property as been updated to comply with some of the changes described above in the Pov4Grasp patch. Fixed the -use option (reading of a color description file) that has been broken since version 2.0 (oops). Added a global transparency through the -color option.  May. 27, 2000  Server problems ! The Alternweb  administrator has some trouble with the new server he installed, and has switched back to the old one until a solution is found. Since my last updates were not on this old server, I've uploaded all the things again. I hope this story will finish soon... Sorry for the inconvenience !  May. 24, 2000  Pov4Grasp 1.21  The grasp_surface object texture handling has been improved and is now supposed to have exactly the same behaviour as mesh object. Multi-layered textures, materials, pigments, normals and finishes statements should work fine. For instance, transparent surfaces are now able to cast both correct shadows and those faster dark shadows which were the only ones allowed in the previous release.  Some code reorganized, but not much; one minor bug fix; added makefile dependencies.  Added more informational and warning messages while parsing grasp_surface objects, especially when dealing with template surfaces and property mapping.  Grasp2pov 2.1  On Linux platforms, the macros defined in the grasp2pov output could lead to an incredible memory leak of POV-Ray 3.1g. Their syntax has been changed; now it seems to work quite normally.  Fixed another possible POV-Ray problem with #ifdef directive that did not work when the surface_texture parameter was actually not defined.  The -special switch is now compatible with POV-Ray 3.1g and uses macros also. I suppose I'm the only one who cares...  Finally the tool has been moved to the download page for consistency.  Apr. 25, 2000  The server seems to be OK now, I've uploaded the DEC and SGI executables. Get it from the download page.  Apr. 19, 2000  Finally the Pov4Grasp website is officially open !  As usual, it may be constantly under construction, and a few sections should be reorganized. Also most of the example scripts and benchmarks are not up to date according to the current release (e.g. POV-ray syntax).  The first online versions are Pov4Grasp 1.2 (POV-Ray patch) and Grasp2pov 2.0 (console conversion tool).  Hope to get some feedback from You, Pov4Grasp User ! Page last updated: Mar 25, 2003 Any comment or suggestion ?