[PyMOL] Question about ray tracing, set_view, surface smoothness

[Gudrun L. <gud...@gm...>]

Dear all,

I wish to ray trace my object so it looks nice. I have chosen a mesh as surface representation.

I did 
viewport 1024, 768
ray 1024, 768

But the mesh is black afterwards and not anymore blue.
Is there a chance to keep the color and have less dominant lines for the mesh?

Is there a chance to view the object in question for example in the XY, YZ plane? Are there somewhere easy rotation matrix available?
I tried to bring my object manually into the YZ plane view, for example, but it works only halfhearted. 
It would be nice to be able to tell pymol in a very easy way which view I would like to see the object.

Thank you for your patience.
Kind regards
Gudrun