When you’re building animations of molecular simulations or presentations, one common experience is realizing that you’ve created a beautiful final animation—only to discover that you don’t have an exportable trajectory of the structures along the way. For many modelers, it feels like a missed opportunity to analyze or re-use movements you carefully created using other animation effects like Simulate, Dock, or Move atoms.
This is where the Record path animation in SAMSON comes in.
What is the Record Path Animation?
The Record path animation does exactly what it says: it tracks and stores the trajectory of atoms throughout a presentation. This enables you to export those movements later for analysis, visualization, or further use in your molecular modeling work.
It’s especially useful for dealing with common pains such as:
- Wanting to export a trajectory after a simulation or animation sequence.
- Needing to review or reuse atomic motions from a previous animation.
- Comparing the output of different simulations or manipulations.
How Do You Use It?
To start recording movements, open the Animation panel in the Animator, and double-click on the Record path animation. A keyframe will be inserted at the current frame. You can move this keyframe just like any other.
Here’s where it gets visual: in the Animator timeline, you will see a track for the record path animation. Segments turn green when positions are successfully recorded and red when they are not recorded or invalidated.
Best Practices and Tips
- The Animator runs from top to bottom, so place the Record path animation after the other animations that change molecular positions. This ensures that it will capture the final changed positions after each frame.
- Worried about performance while refining your animation? You can temporarily disable the recording by right-clicking the Record path animation or through its Inspector panel. When disabled, the animation controller will appear darkened.
Exporting the Trajectory
After your presentation is complete—and your animation track is fully green—you’ll want to capture the trajectory as a real data object in your document. You can do this in two quick ways:
- Go to the Inspector panel and click Create path.
- Or, right-click on the Record path animation in the Animator and choose Create path.
This will add a new Path node storing the atomic movements, which you can then use independently of the animation. Perfect for exporting, comparing, or building upon in other projects.
To learn more and access the full documentation, head over to this page.
SAMSON and all SAMSON Extensions are free for non-commercial use. You can download SAMSON at https://www.samson-connect.net.