Molecular visualizations can be powerful storytelling tools. Whether you’re preparing a presentation, a scientific movie, or just documenting your molecular model’s behavior over time, a smooth camera trajectory is crucial. However, many molecular modelers have encountered this frustrating issue: suddenly, the view jumps between two frames of the animation, even though you haven’t added any camera movement. Why does this happen, and how can you prevent it?
The culprit is often not what you did—but what you didn’t do. By default in SAMSON, if there’s no explicit camera animation, the view remains as last modified manually. This means that any interactive change to the view (e.g., rotating or zooming a molecule) affects what gets recorded in frames. So, without active control, your “static” view might vary across frames simply because you navigated differently during the modeling session.
Enter the Hold Camera animation
The Hold camera animation in SAMSON addresses exactly this issue. Instead of introducing new motion, it locks the camera in place between two frames, preserving your intended view.
This is particularly useful when:
- You want parts of your animation to have no camera movement.
- You’ve manually positioned the camera at a specific angle or zoom level, and want to preserve this view across multiple frames, even after working on other parts of the document.
- You’re layering effects but don’t want the camera to reset or flicker due to lack of animation constraints.
How to use it
- In the Animator’s Track view, select the frame where you want the static view to begin.
- Manually move the camera to your desired orientation.
- Double-click on the Hold camera animation in the Animation panel.
- Specify the end frame to determine how long the camera should hold that view.
The Hold camera animation isn’t just a workaround—it’s a useful design tool. You can chain together different camera effects (e.g., Move camera, zoom in, rotate) interspersed with Hold camera spans to pace your storytelling and control focus.
Tips
- You can move the start and end frames of the Hold camera animation at any time.
- If you’re not seeing the Animation panel, access it via Interface > Animator or use Ctrl + 7 (Cmd + 7 on macOS).
- Even if you’re not planning a full animation, adding a Hold camera can help tidy the presentation of static molecular scenes.
Understanding how camera animations work—and where they don’t—can save you time and frustration. It also gives you more control as a visual communicator, especially in educational and research settings.
To learn more about the Hold camera animation, visit the official documentation page.
SAMSON and all SAMSON Extensions are free for non-commercial use. You can get SAMSON at https://www.samson-connect.net.