When working on molecular presentations, particularly those involving systems like membranes, surfaces, or long assemblies (e.g., DNA or polymer chains), it’s often essential to maintain a consistent perspective while shifting the viewpoint across the structure. A common challenge arises: how do you smoothly slide the camera along the system without rotating or tilting the view?
This is where the Truck camera animation in SAMSON becomes very helpful. Rather than orbiting around your molecular system or zooming in/out, the Truck camera lets you create a horizontal panning motion. It’s particularly useful when you need to compare different parts of a system while maintaining the same view direction, making subtle structural differences easier to visualize.
What is Truck Camera Animation?
The Truck camera animation moves both the camera position and target point in parallel, in a horizontal direction within the camera’s reference frame. This means the view remains stable while the visible portion of the scene shifts sideways — much like moving a camera on a dolly in a film set.
Here’s what makes this movement unique:
- It preserves the orientation of the view.
- Both target and camera move together horizontally.
- Very handy for large, planar or linear molecular systems.
How to Apply It
To insert this animation effect:
- Choose the start frame in the Animator’s Track view, and orient your view to the desired starting position.
- In the Animation panel, double-click the Truck camera effect.
- The current camera position and target are saved as the start keyframe. SAMSON then automatically shifts both horizontally for the end frame.
- Adjust the final keyframe and duration as needed.
You can always move the start and end frames or customize easing curves to change the pacing of the animation.
Customizing the Animation
The Truck camera animation is typically applied to the active camera. If needed, you can inspect the animation and disable this setting to apply it to a specific camera object instead.
There’s also an important option to consider: Keep camera upwards. If enabled, the animation uses the scene’s grid to determine what counts as “horizontal.” This is useful when working with systems where spatial orientation is vital — for instance, avoiding unintentional tilts when viewing a cell membrane from the top.
Adjusting Target and Position
You can fine-tune how the camera moves by manually adjusting the target point and position at each keyframe. However, note that the Truck camera has some constraints to keep the animation horizontal. To learn more about this, check the section Adjusting camera positions in the SAMSON documentation.
When to Use It
This animation type is especially valuable for creating walkthroughs and comparative visualizations of:
- Surface-based molecular systems or layers
- Membrane proteins and lipid bilayers
- Crystal planes or slab models
- Nanowires or nanotubes viewed along their axis
If you’re preparing presentations for colleagues, students, or publications, this kind of stable, linear movement can help viewers stay oriented while exploring extended models.
Learn more and explore all options in the original documentation page here.
SAMSON and all SAMSON Extensions are free for non-commercial use. You can get SAMSON at https://www.samson-connect.net.