When preparing molecular animations or presentations, a common issue many molecular modelers face is how to generate smooth, visually informative rotations around a structure. You want to highlight a molecular assembly from all angles, but manually moving the camera frame by frame is time-consuming and rarely results in a natural-looking orbit.
If you’ve encountered this, the Orbit camera animation in SAMSON could save you a lot of manual work while producing elegant, smooth-viewing sequences.
Why orbiting matters in molecular modeling
Whether you’re demonstrating a protein complex, a porous material, or drug binding in a pocket, presenting your model dynamically from multiple view angles can reveal symmetries, spatial relationships, or buried features that are hard to appreciate from a single view. Orbiting animations help others—and yourself—better understand your structure in 3D.
How does Orbit camera work?
The Orbit camera effect makes your viewpoint revolve around a selected target point—typically the center of the molecular structure. This creates a continuous circular motion around the molecule, making it easy to generate fly-around videos and enhance interactive presentations.
Adding an Orbit camera animation
Here are the basic steps to set up an orbiting motion around your model in SAMSON:
- First, orient the view approximately in the plane you want the camera to rotate.
- Then, open the Animation panel in the Animator and double-click on Orbit camera to insert the animation effect.
- Set the desired end frame for the rotation.
Tips for accurate orbiting
By default, the orbit rotates the active camera around its target position, which is set to the current center of view. Here is what you should know to fine tune the effect:
- Target point: You can reposition it using camera controllers if the default position doesn’t match your structural area of interest.
- Rotation plane: This depends on whether the grid display is on. When the grid is off, the rotation plane is based on screen space. When it’s on, the orbit aligns with the grid plane.
- Easing curves: You can adjust how fast the camera rotates at different points in the animation using easing functions for smoother or more dynamic effects.
Controlling the camera
If the default orbit does not frame your structure the way you’d like, you can adjust key camera attributes manually using visual camera controllers. These allow you to set:
- Target (central) point
- Camera orientation at specific keyframes
Don’t forget: you may need to zoom out to see all camera controllers. Use your scroll wheel or Ctrl/Cmd + -.
Bonus: Thumbnails for easy framing
As you adjust camera positions, SAMSON automatically generates thumbnails at the bottom of your viewport. These snapshots make it easy to find the best framing and quickly navigate between key views.
Learn more
Orbit camera animation is a simple yet powerful way to enrich your molecular presentations. For a complete overview, you can read the full documentation page here.
SAMSON and all SAMSON Extensions are free for non-commercial use. You can get SAMSON at https://www.samson-connect.net.