When preparing molecular presentations, one frequent challenge is communicating spatial relationships without overwhelming the viewer with motion or detail. If a complex appears out of nowhere or its components aren’t clearly transitioning into place, the educational value can be diminished. This is especially true for new viewers, students, or even collaborators unfamiliar with a structure’s layout. Fortunately, SAMSON’s Assemble animation addresses this challenge.
The Assemble animation lets you stage a smooth entry: structural nodes or meshes begin from spaced-out, inferred positions and move into their current configuration. It’s a subtle but powerful visual technique to guide your audience’s attention, making it easier to recognize how components come together.
Why Assemble?
Imagine you’re showing a protein-ligand binding site. Rather than plunging immediately into the final bound structure, a short animation of the ligand moving from a distant point into its pocket helps to contextualize binding orientation and molecular fit. The Assemble animation adds this spatial sense without requiring manual scripting of coordinates.
Setting It Up
To apply the Assemble animation in SAMSON:
- Begin by selecting a group of structural nodes or meshes. These are the components that will be animated.
- Then, go to the Animation panel in the Animator and double-click the Assemble effect. If nothing is selected, SAMSON will infer what to animate.
- Keyframes mark the start and end of the animation. You can drag them to adjust the timing of the movement.
When added, the system automatically computes starting positions for the selected fields, placing them away from their destination. This allows the components to assemble toward their final positions during playback.
Controlling the Animation
You can tweak the motion’s amplitude — how far away components start — using SAMSON’s Inspector. For smoother or more dynamic pacing, you can modify the easing curve to control how parameters change between frames.
Here’s what it looks like in action:
This animation style is especially useful in educational settings, publications, or presentations, where clarity of assembly or spatial engagement is key. It’s a small addition that can significantly improve how your content is understood — without needing to script movement manually.
Examples from the Community
If you’re curious, check out these examples showcasing the Assemble animation within shared documents on SAMSON Connect:
By integrating the Assemble animation into molecular presentations, you make your work more accessible to others — whether that means helping a class visualize folding, guiding a colleague through a binding pathway, or enriching a research talk with intuitive visuals.
To learn more about the Assemble animation and how to integrate it into your workflows, visit the full documentation at https://documentation.samson-connect.net/users/latest/animations/assemble/.
SAMSON and all SAMSON Extensions are free for non-commercial use. You can download SAMSON at https://www.samson-connect.net.