I agree that there are a couple of small details that can be improved in the camera handling in VNL, and this can be expected to appear in future versions.
Still, exporting to external visualizers is certainly relevant anyway, the main issue is just which file format to use.
The 2009.11 version of ATK/VNL has built-in support for exporting 3D grids into a CUBE file. I've tried to adapt that code to work with ATK 2008.10, the module is attached. Since I don't actually have any software at hand that can read cube files, I haven't had a chance to check that the export actually works, however... Hopefully someone in the community can assist with this task!
Here's an example of how to use it:
from ATK.TwoProbe import *
from export_cube import *
scf = restoreSelfConsistentCalculation('lih2li-scf.nc')
electron_density = calculateElectronDensity (scf)
export_cube_file(electron_density,'file.cube')