When preparing a molecular animation for a presentation, publication, or educational material, a common challenge many researchers face is managing what the viewer sees—and what they don’t. Uncluttered visuals lead to greater clarity, but temporary removal and reappearance of molecular components during key parts of an animation can be time-consuming to synchronize manually.
That’s where the Hidden animation in SAMSON can offer a more elegant solution. This animation type allows you to hide specific nodes (atoms, molecules, or groups of molecular entities) between two keyframes—without altering their transparency settings. This subtle yet powerful feature ensures that you can momentarily remove components from your scene to bring attention to others, keeping your audience focused on what matters most.
What Does It Do Exactly?
The Hidden animation toggles the visibility (not transparency) of selected nodes across keyframes. This means that for the duration between two points in time on your animation timeline, the selected structures will be invisible—they won’t be shown at all.
Unlike the transparency effects, this approach completely removes the visual clutter rather than partially dimming it. This is particularly useful in complex assemblies or when walking through a simulation sequence where focus needs to shift from one structure to another progressively.
How to Use the Hidden Animation
The process is very straightforward within SAMSON:
- Select the nodes you’d like to hide during part of your animation.
- Open the Animation panel within the Animator.
- Double-click on the Hidden animation effect. SAMSON will insert a begin keyframe at the current frame, hiding the selected nodes.
- Adjust or move your keyframes as needed to control when the nodes disappear and reappear.
These animations can be refined further using easing curves, which determine how the transition happens across frames. While hiding doesn’t require elaborate interpolation, adjusting easing might help when coordinating multiple concurrent events in your scene.
When to Use Hidden vs Transparency?
The key difference is whether you want your structure to remain visually present in some form.
- Use Hidden when you want a node to be completely gone from view—e.g., removing a solvent box around a protein core at a specific moment.
- Use transparency adjustments when maintaining visual context is important—e.g., showing a protein shell becoming translucent to expose the inner binding pocket.
A Visual Example
Here’s a short animation that demonstrates how the Shown and Hidden animations pair together to guide viewer attention:
This example illustrates how components can be toggled on and off in a contextually meaningful way, one moment at a time.
Learn more about the Hidden animation here.
SAMSON and all SAMSON Extensions are free for non-commercial use. You can download SAMSON at https://www.samson-connect.net.