When preparing molecular animations or presentations, it’s common to need fine control over which parts of your model are visible at specific moments. Whether you’re explaining a ligand binding site, highlighting a subunit, or focusing attention step-by-step during a conformational change, the ability to selectively show parts of your scene becomes vital.
This is where the Shown animation in SAMSON can help. Instead of toggling transparency or fiddling with manual visibility settings at every frame, the Shown animation gives you a clean and efficient way to control what is visible—and when.
What’s the pain?
Suppose you’re creating an educational video featuring a complex biomolecular assembly. At first, you want just the backbone of the protein visible. Later, you reveal key sidechains involved in catalysis. Maybe you want ligands or water molecules to appear only at specific times. Manually animating visibility changes can be tedious and error-prone—and breaking continuity by animating transparency may result in distracting visual effects.
What the Shown animation does
The Shown animation effect in SAMSON makes selected nodes appear between two keyframes by toggling their visibility. It does not change their transparency—nodes are either visible or not—ensuring clean transitions that match intended narrative points in your presentation.
How to use it
- Select the nodes you’d like to show at a specific moment (e.g., chain A, a ligand molecule, etc.).
- Open the Animation panel from the Animator.
- Double-click the Shown effect. A begin keyframe is automatically generated at the current frame.
- You can then drag the keyframes to adjust when the visibility change begins and ends.
These keyframes can be moved at any point, giving you full control over timing. A simple animation timeline modification can completely restructure your storytelling approach.
Good to know
While an older video may reference a now-deprecated Animation menu, all animation functionality is available and centralized within the Animation panel. You can find all visibility-related animations—including Hidden, Show, Hide, and more—ready to be used without navigating menus.
Going further: Smooth transitions
If you need more granular control over how quickly an element becomes visible, consider adjusting the easing curve. Although visibility in the Shown animation is binary, easing curves apply to many other animations and can help you synchronize visual elements with other transitions (movement, rotation, etc.) for a more polished effect.
Why it matters
Effortlessly controlling what appears on screen allows molecular modelers to tell clearer, more structured stories. Whether you’re teaching, publishing, or simply sharing discoveries, a clean animation with intentional visibility transitions helps retain viewer attention and clarify the science behind your models.
To learn more, visit the original documentation page: https://documentation.samson-connect.net/users/latest/animations/shown/
SAMSON and all SAMSON Extensions are free for non-commercial use. You can get SAMSON at https://www.samson-connect.net