Creating compelling molecular animations can significantly enhance presentations, teaching, or collaborative discussions. But controlling how the camera moves in 3D space can sometimes feel unintuitive, especially when you want to create subtle perspective shifts without rotating or panning too drastically.
This is where SAMSON’s Pedestal camera animation comes in—a simple yet effective way to move the camera vertically while preserving the view direction. If you’ve ever struggled with maintaining orientation while navigating complex molecular assemblies, this feature might be just what you need.
What is the Pedestal Camera Animation?
The Pedestal camera animation allows you to move the camera and the center of view vertically in sync between two keyframes. Unlike orbiting or panning, this keeps the view consistent while lifting it in a straight upward or downward motion. It’s especially helpful when you want to present different vertical sections of stacked systems—like membrane proteins, lattices, or multilayer assemblies—without losing the orientation you’ve carefully set.
Why It Matters to Molecular Modelers
In structural biology or materials science, aligning molecules precisely can be key to understanding their function or interactions. Visualizing stacked molecular systems such as bilayers, nanorods, or DNA origami structures often benefits from slow vertical camera movement. With traditional navigation, it’s easy to lose your relative angles or accidentally rotate when all you needed was a simple lift.
The Pedestal camera solves this by giving you vertical motion with precision and repeatability. It’s especially useful in animations where you want to walk your audience through layers of a model or show time-evolved changes layer by layer.
How to Use It
- In the Animator’s Track view, set your start frame and orient the view as desired.
- Double-click the Pedestal camera effect in the Animation panel.
- The current camera position and target become your start point. At the end frame, both are shifted vertically upward by the same amount.
- You can then drag the end frame on the timeline to adjust when the lift completes.
Need to keep the camera’s vertical alignment consistent across multiple cameras or grid settings? You can inspect the animation to:
- Toggle the Apply to active camera option if multiple cameras are involved
- Control whether the camera respects the grid’s orientation using the Keep camera upwards checkbox
- Adjust the Easing curve to control the feel of the motion—e.g., linear, slow-in/slow-out
Fine-Tuning the Experience
While the Pedestal animation allows camera movement control, it does have some restrictions for fine-tuning. You can adjust start and end positions using animation controllers, but the vertical movement logic should be preserved if you want consistent results.
This makes it ideal for segmenting molecular systems vertically or just giving your visuals a more cinematic feel without overcomplicating things.
To learn more, see the full documentation for the Pedestal camera animation: https://documentation.samson-connect.net/users/latest/animations/pedestal-camera/
SAMSON and all SAMSON Extensions are free for non-commercial use. You can get SAMSON at https://www.samson-connect.net.