OVITO lets you work with and analyze simulation data interactively. However, to share your work with others, you likely want to produce static images or videos to be included in publications or presentations. Rendering and saving images or movies is done from the Render tab of the command panel, which is shown on the right.
In the Render settings panel you control the generation
of output images and movies, for example by setting the desired image resolution and background color.
Click the button to start the rendering process. OVITO will open a new window to display the generated image, which can be saved to disk or copied to the
clipboard.
OVITO provides two different rendering engines. The first one is the hardware-accelerated OpenGL renderer, which is also used in the interactive viewports for real-time display. Accordingly, this renderer is very fast and produces pictures that are more or less identical to what you see in the interactive viewports. The second option is the Tachyon renderer, a software-based raytracing engine. It supports real shadows and ambient occlusion shading, but it usually takes longer to compute an image with this renderer.
OpenGL renderer: | Tachyon renderer: |
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If you have loaded a simulation sequence, you can let OVITO render an animated movie of it and save it as a video file. Select Complete animation in the Render settings panel and set a name and encoding format for the output video file. OVITO's built-in video encoder supports common video formats such as AVI and MPEG.
The playback speed (frames per second) of the video to be generated can be changed in the Animation settings dialog, which can be opened from the animation toolbar. Alternatively, you can produce a series of separate image files and combine them to a video later using an external video encoding tool. More details on OVITO's animation capabilities can be found here.
Interactive viewport: | Rendered image: |
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The interative viewport in OVITO and the static output image being rendered may have different aspect ratios, depending on the rendering resolution you specified. Thus, the visible region in the output image might slightly differ from what you see in the interactive viewport. To help you positioning the virtual camera and adjust the visible portion of the viewport, it is possible to activate the viewport menu. As shown in the screenshot on the right, now a semi-transparent frame in the interactive viewport indicates the region that will be visible in the final output image.
for a viewport in the