Creating polished molecular presentations often requires more than just smooth transitions and camera paths. A common challenge for molecular modelers is how to blend scientific content with presentation slides to create a seamless, communicative experience. Whether you’re preparing a conference talk or an internal review, integrating non-molecular visuals—like slides or diagrams—into your molecular video can be tricky.
In SAMSON, this task is made more accessible with the Set background animation. This animation effect allows you to switch the scene background at specified keyframes, and crucially, lets you insert background images such as slides during your molecular animation. This means your molecules can now share the screen with contextual information in a synced and animated way.
What Problem Does This Solve?
Imagine you’re animating the interaction between two proteins and want to pause momentarily to highlight an experimental result, a graph, or a hypothesis diagram—without cutting away from the animation. The Set background effect enables you to do just that: overlay your explanation in the background while the molecular focus remains on-screen.
This is particularly useful when you’re:
- Preparing educational content with annotated slides.
- Combining scientific visuals with explanatory diagrams.
- Creating molecular animations that need multimedia support.
Adding the Background
To use this feature, just double-click on the Set background animation in the Animation panel of the Animator. A begin keyframe will be set at your current frame. From there, you can adjust the keyframes along the timeline as needed.
The animation uses two keyframes:
- Keyframe 1: The background image is applied.
- Keyframe 2: If another background animation follows, SAMSON will interpolate smoothly from one image to the next.
Whether you want the image to be contained within the viewport or stretched to cover it (potentially cropping it), SAMSON gives you control. To define this, select the contain or cover option when adding your image.
Fine-Tuning the Transition
You can make the background switching more visually appealing by adjusting the easing curve from the Inspector. The easing curve determines how the transition behaves—in other words, how fast or slow the change will occur between keyframes. By tweaking this curve, your background transitions can feel more natural and better integrated with the pace of your molecular animation.
Final Thoughts
This feature makes it easier to create richer, more explanatory content—without leaving the Animator timeline. You don’t have to resort to editing your video externally just to drop in slide-like visuals. By keeping it all in SAMSON, you can preserve interactivity and avoid loss of detail in molecular scenes.
Whether you’re building a video walkthrough for a paper or teaching students how a drug candidate interacts with a protein, adding controlled background visuals helps turn complex results into clearer stories.
To learn more about the Set background animation, visit the official documentation page.
SAMSON and all SAMSON Extensions are free for non-commercial use. You can download SAMSON from samson-connect.net.