When presenting complex molecular structures or telling molecular design stories, clarity is critical. Whether you’re building educational content, preparing a conference presentation, or designing a supplementary movie for a paper, the ability to draw attention to individual molecular components in a controlled, timely fashion is essential. This is where animation tools like Show in SAMSON can make a real difference.
Rather than relying on transparency or manually toggling visibility mid-animation, the Show animation allows you to precisely control when selected molecular nodes become visible—with minimal work and complete reproducibility.
What does the Show animation do?
At its core, the Show animation makes selected nodes (e.g. atoms, molecules, surfaces) become visible starting from a particular keyframe and stay visible through the rest of the playback. This is done by toggling node visibility, not transparency, which gives a clean on/off behavior ideal for assembling structures or timed reveals.
If you’ve ever found yourself manually coordinating multiple visibility keyframes or stacking hidden↔shown effects, Show saves time by simplifying the process into a single animation. It’s essentially a streamlined version of combining the Hidden and Shown animations in succession.
Why might this help you?
- 🧬 Illustrating a molecular assembly step-by-step? Show helps components pop into view when their time comes.
- 🎥 Making a protein domain appear mid-animation to explain function? One Show effect handles it.
- 🗂️ Want to compare structural variations by revealing ligands only at the right moment? Show is your friend.
How to add it
- First, select the nodes you want to make appear.
- Open the Animator panel and double-click on the Show animation effect.
- The animation inserts three keyframes:
- Between keyframes 1 & 2: nodes stay hidden
- From keyframe 2 onwards: nodes are visible
- You can drag any of these keyframes to adjust timing.
A detail to remember
The Animation menu shown in older tutorials no longer exists in SAMSON. All animation effects, including Show, are now available in the Animation panel under Animator. For quick access, you can press:
- Ctrl + 7 (Windows/Linux)
- Cmd + 7 (Mac)
Bonus: Smooth transitions
While Show controls visibility as a discrete on/off change, you can still fine-tune perception by adjusting the easing curve of the animation. This controls how parameters interpolate across frames and can help match the timing of visibility changes with other animated effects.
Learn more about the Show animation in the official documentation.
SAMSON and all SAMSON Extensions are free for non-commercial use. Get SAMSON at https://www.samson-connect.net.