Creating photorealistic molecular visuals can be time-consuming if each element needs to be manually styled. Whether you’re working on a publication figure, a presentation, or simply want to explore your models with more visual clarity, adjusting visual materials quickly and easily becomes crucial — not to mention, it’s a lot more fun when it feels effortless.
If you’ve ever found yourself wondering how to give your scene that polished appearance without diving into complex rendering parameters, SAMSON’s integration of the Cycles Renderer — also used in Blender — offers a practical solution. One of its most convenient features is the use of material appearance presets, letting you give objects a look like Gold, Glass, Carbon Fiber, or even glowing Emissive surfaces, just by selecting from a list.
Why material presets matter
Molecular modelers often need to distinguish between different types of molecules, ligands, or surfaces visually. While color helps, material properties like shine, roughness, and translucency can add another layer of clarity and realism—especially for educational or communication purposes.
With SAMSON, thanks to the Cycles Renderer integration, you can access a wide selection of appearance presets that automatically assign realistic material settings to your models. No graphic design expertise required.
Where to find them
In SAMSON, materials are controlled through the Inspector. Once an object is selected, simply choose an appearance preset relevant to the kind of surface or effect you want.
Presets are grouped into several categories to make selection intuitive:
- Metallic: Gold, Steel, Silver, Copper, etc.
- Semi-metallic: Bronze, Pearl, Rust
- Smooth surfaces: Plastic, Ceramic, Satin
- Rough surfaces: Velvet, Wood, Concrete
- Emissive: Glowing or light-emitting presets, ideal for fluorescent tags or highlights
- Transparent: Glass, Water, Ice
Customize further
If you’d like to go beyond the preset settings, the Inspector offers control over individual material parameters like roughness, intensity, color, and metallic factor. This is useful when you want to tweak the effect subtly without starting from scratch.
Examples in action
Here are a few visuals produced using only a couple of applied presets. These give a sense of how a well-chosen material type can enhance how a molecule is perceived.
Minimize effort, maximize clarity
Whether your focus is scientific communication or interactive exploration, using appearance presets can dramatically reduce the time you spend adjusting rendering settings manually, while still achieving a highly readable, polished effect.
To explore more material types and advanced controls, check out the full documentation: Rendering with Cycles in SAMSON.
SAMSON and all SAMSON Extensions are free for non-commercial use. You can download SAMSON at www.samson-connect.net.