Creating animations of molecular structures can be a powerful way to communicate scientific results. But often, modelers struggle to frame their molecules in a visually smooth and structured way. An all-too-common issue: static or jerky camera movements that fail to capture molecular geometry clearly and leave viewers disoriented.
This is where SAMSON’s Orbit camera animation comes into play. It lets you automatically rotate around your molecule while maintaining focus on a central point. This results in more intuitive, cinematic visuals—without manual camera adjustments on each frame.
When to Use the Orbit Camera
Suppose you’re preparing a molecular presentation or recording a short clip of your system to share with your research group. Rather than painstakingly keyframing the camera’s position, you can apply Orbit camera to create a smooth, continuous rotation around your structure, ideal for showing shape, symmetry, or surface characteristics.
How It Works
The Orbit camera makes the camera revolve around its target point, which is typically the center of your molecular view.
First, you orient the camera the way you’d like the rotation plane to be defined. This initial orientation determines the “orbit plane.” Then you simply double-click the Orbit camera animation effect from the Animation panel inside the Animator. You can set a target end frame to define the duration of the rotation.
Practical Control
By default, the camera animation applies to the active camera in your workspace. However, this can be customized by inspecting the animation and assigning another camera.
Through the Inspector, you can also:
- Change whether the animation should align relative to the grid (useful when your scene contains planes of symmetry).
- Adjust interpolation behavior with the Easing curve.
Fine-Tuning the Camera
After adding the Orbit camera animation, you can adjust the path using animation controllers. These allow you to move the camera and define the central focus point more precisely. If you don’t see the controllers right away, try zooming out in the viewport using Ctrl/Cmd + scroll or minus (-).
Conveniently, while you’re making these adjustments, Thumbnails appear to help you select the most visually effective shots.
See It in Action
Looking for real-life use cases? These public presentations use the Orbit camera animation to great effect:
To learn more about working with the Orbit camera in SAMSON, visit the official Orbit camera documentation page.
SAMSON and all SAMSON Extensions are free for non-commercial use. You can download SAMSON at www.samson-connect.net.