Rendering NGLView trajectories as images or movies

[cxhernandez]

https://github.com/arose/nglview/blob/a0814a824b13065b130044ca271ee19faad2d2aa/nglview/tests/notebooks/export_image.ipynb

This is pretty sweet. And would be useful for interactive movie-making.

@arose, @hainm: This might be a dumb question, but would it at all possible to render images independent of the notebook? Would something like a headless browser work?

[hainm]

@cxhernandez it's in @arose TODO list. Please check this issue. I will ping you when the feature is available.

For movie making, I made an complete example here: (for amber users but should work for others):
http://ambermd.org/tutorials/analysis/tutorial_notebooks/nglview_movie/

And if you check out the nglview dev version, you can use the GUI to save a series of images.
(I think this is shortest solution to make a movie for now):

[hainm]

alternatively, you can try 'mdsrv' (which uses NGL for rendering too).

I made changes from @arose' repo to work with pytraj and NGL-dev version. But you can change a bit to use it with mdtraj: https://github.com/Amber-MD/mdsrv

[arose]

What @hainm is saying, and

Would something like headless browser work?

I haven't tried it yet, the crucial part is WebGL support, otherwise it should not be a problem. See also nglviewer/ngl#173.