When you’re preparing animations of molecular systems—whether for presentations, publications, or teaching—one small but recurring challenge is managing what’s visible at each stage of the animation. Sometimes, you want parts of the system to disappear temporarily to help focus your audience’s attention.
If you’ve been manually chaining visibility effects or tweaking transparency settings, it may feel unnecessarily complex. The good news: SAMSON’s Hide animation is designed to streamline exactly this aspect.
What does the Hide animation do?
The Hide animation makes selected nodes (which can be atoms, residues, molecules, or models) become invisible starting from a specified keyframe and remain hidden up to the end of the animation segment. This is not merely changing transparency; the nodes are fully removed from the visualization.
This animation essentially combines the behavior of a Shown effect followed by a Hidden effect—offering a smoother workflow by removing the need to manage two separate effects.
When is this useful?
There are a variety of use cases where hiding parts of your system during an animation brings clarity:
- Zooming into a binding pocket: Temporarily hide a protein shell to reveal embedded ligands.
- Focus on a specific substructure: Remove redundant or distracting areas of a large molecular complex.
- Step-by-step reaction illustration: Hide intermediates or reactants after they’ve served their visual purpose.
How to apply the Hide effect
1. First, select the nodes you want to hide.
2. In the Animator, navigate to the Animation panel and double-click the Hide effect.
The animation you add will feature three keyframes:
- Keyframe 1 to Keyframe 2: nodes are visible
- At Keyframe 2: nodes disappear
- Keyframe 2 to Keyframe 3: nodes remain hidden
You can adjust the timing by moving these keyframes in the Animator.
Adjusting the feel of your animation
The transition to a hidden state can be made more visually natural by tweaking the easing curve. While the Hide effect itself is instantaneous by default, customizing the easing can subtly impact how the rest of your animation flows, aiding in storytelling.
Note on the interface
The documentation shows the use of an Animation menu that is no longer part of the current SAMSON interface. All animations, including Hide, are now accessed through the Animator’s Animation panel. You can quickly bring it up with Ctrl + 7 (on Windows/Linux) or Cmd + 7 (on macOS).
Visual Effect in Action
Here’s a quick look at how the Hide animation works in a molecular animation:
Using Hide doesn’t just simplify your workflow—it eliminates visual clutter and helps your audience follow the signal, not the noise.
To learn more about the Hide effect in SAMSON, visit the full documentation page here.
SAMSON and all SAMSON Extensions are free for non-commercial use. You can download SAMSON at https://www.samson-connect.net.