Visual consistency is an often-overlooked aspect of molecular modeling. Whether you’re preparing figures for a publication, creating teaching material, or exploring molecular systems interactively, getting your visualization just right — and keeping it consistent across models and sessions — can take significant time.
This is where Visual Presets in SAMSON come in. Visual presets allow you to save and reapply combinations of display settings across different molecules in a repeatable and accessible way. Whether you’re molecular modeler, educator, or scientific communicator, this can help you work more efficiently — and always keep your visualizations clear and professional-looking. 🧬🎨
Why visual presets can save you hours
Let’s say you frequently use a specific coloring scheme for proteins — perhaps cartoon representation with helix structures in red, sheets in yellow, and loops in white. If you manually configure this each time you load a new molecule, that’s minutes lost per session — plus the risk of inconsistency creeping in, especially when working in teams.
With SAMSON’s Visual Presets, you can save this configuration once and reapply it to any structure in a single click. This becomes even more critical when working with complex multi-component systems or preparing teaching examples where uniformity of representation is crucial.
How to use visual presets
Here’s how to start using visual presets in SAMSON:
- Configure your molecular system’s appearance (representation type, color scheme, etc.) the way you want.
- Open the Visual Presets panel from the SAMSON interface (see the Visual Presets section in the documentation).
- Click ‘Create New Preset’. You can name it descriptively, like ‘Publication Style’ or ‘Cartoon Color Scheme’.
- This preset is now saved and can be applied anytime to any molecular system.
Presets can include various settings:
- Representation types (e.g., ball and stick, cartoon, van der Waals)
- Coloring schemes (e.g., by chain, by residue, by element)
- Material settings (lighting, specularity, transparency, etc.)
They don’t just improve efficiency—they ensure your work remains visually consistent across different projects or sessions. This is especially useful in collaborative environments or when sharing media online.
An educational edge
If you’re teaching chemistry or molecular biology, visual presets can help streamline lesson prep. Design a preset for a specific curriculum theme — say, highlighting ligand-binding sites in a certain way — and reuse it across lectures. Students will appreciate the clarity and consistency.
Collaborating with clarity
Using presets means that everyone on your team can apply the same visualization standards without manual reconfiguration. Share presets across projects easily and spend less time on visual alignment, more on science.
You can learn more about Visual Presets and how they integrate into the SAMSON user experience in the official documentation here: https://documentation.samson-connect.net/users/latest/visual-presets/
To explore the full list of SAMSON documentation references, visit: https://documentation.samson-connect.net/users/latest/references/
Note: SAMSON and all SAMSON Extensions are free for non-commercial use. You can download SAMSON at https://www.samson-connect.net.