Have you ever needed to visualize how atoms move over time during your molecular animation? Whether you’re showcasing a docking process, simulating molecular dynamics, or illustrating a mechanism of action, a common challenge is to record and later export clear and accurate paths of atomic motion. This is especially important when preparing molecular presentations for publication, communication, or teaching.
If you’ve tried manually tracking trajectories or stitching together transformations, you know how tedious and error-prone this can be. SAMSON offers a quick and robust solution to this: the Record path animation effect.
What is the Record path animation?
The Record path animation in SAMSON allows you to automatically record the trajectories of atoms over time by simply adding this animation effect to your Animator. Once enabled, it tracks how atoms move throughout your animation, storing their positions frame by frame.
What’s especially convenient is how Record path integrates with other SAMSON animations that affect atomic positions—like Assemble, Dock, Move atoms, or Simulate. All you need to do is ensure that Record path comes after those animations in the Animator (animations are executed from top to bottom). This ensures that the atomic movement you care about is captured accurately.
Here’s how the progress looks visually:
In this image, segments appear in green when positions are successfully recorded. Red means that positions are missing or have become outdated.
Controlling recordings
Recording can be toggled for performance reasons. For instance, if you’re still experimenting with other animation effects and don’t want to commit to recording yet, you can disable the recording temporarily. You can do this directly in the Inspector or by right-clicking the animation in the Animator panel and selecting Enable recording. When disabled, the animation controllers will be darkened as a visual cue.
Exporting your trajectory to a path node
Once your animation has run (completely and with the Record path active), and all segments are green, SAMSON lets you create a dedicated Path node from the recorded trajectory. This lets you reuse or visualize the path independently of the animation process itself.
You can export this path in one of two quick steps:
- In the Inspector of the Record path animation, click on Create path.
- Alternatively, right-click on the Record path animation in the Animator and choose Create path.
This generates a path object inside your document that represents atomic motion, which can then be styled, animated, or exported as needed.
A practical tip for clean animations
Remember: move your keyframes freely. If you initially placed the Record path animation effect somewhere inconvenient, you can adjust it along your timeline to precisely match when atoms start moving.
The Record path tool can save hours of manual tracking and helps ensure that your molecular animations communicate clearly and accurately. If you’re preparing content for collaborators, students, or publication, showing actual motion pathways can enhance clarity considerably.
To learn more, visit the full documentation page: https://documentation.samson-connect.net/users/latest/animations/record-path/
SAMSON and all SAMSON Extensions are free for non-commercial use. You can download SAMSON at https://www.samson-connect.net.