A Quick Guide to Finding Cameras in Complex Molecular Scenes

When working with complex molecular systems, the ability to navigate and interpret the 3D scene efficiently can significantly improve your productivity—and reduce frustration. In SAMSON, camera nodes play a central role in visualizing and navigating molecular scenes, but there’s a common pain point that molecular modelers encounter: how to quickly identify and manage camera nodes, especially when your document contains hundreds or even thousands of nodes of various types.

This is where the Node Specification Language (NSL) in SAMSON becomes extremely helpful. Specifically, the camera attribute space (short name ca) allows you to filter and specify camera nodes directly using compact and readable expressions.

Why You Might Need This

Let’s say you’ve saved multiple viewpoint cameras during your modeling workflow—for example, different perspectives of a protein-ligand interface. Later, you need to jump back to a specific one, or delete the ones you no longer need. You could scroll through a long node inspector list—or you could use NSL to do it instantly.

Using the camera Attribute Space

Camera attributes in NSL are accessed using the ca prefix, which ensures filters apply only to nodes of type “camera”. Here are some of the most useful attributes at your disposal:

  • ca.n: Matches the camera name (n is the short name for name).
  • ca.selected: Checks whether a camera node is selected or not.
  • ca.sf: This is short for selectionFlag, useful for tracking selection state in more complex scripts.

Practical Examples

  • ca.n "TopView" → All camera nodes named “TopView”.
  • ca.n "View*" → All camera nodes with names beginning with “View”.
  • ca.selected → All currently selected cameras.
  • not ca.selected → All cameras not currently selected.

These expressions can be typed into the SAMSON search field to directly highlight matching nodes in the document. This means you can isolate all camera views with one click, or delete unneeded ones with another. Especially in modeling sessions involving multiple stakeholders or multiple visualizations, the ability to filter cameras is a huge time-saver.

Tips for Organizing Your Views

It’s good practice to name your camera nodes meaningfully: for example, "BindingSiteView" or "BackboneOverview". This makes it easy to retrieve them later using filters like ca.n "*View".

Also, note that the selected and selectionFlag attributes behave slightly differently: selected is tied to the current UI selection, while selectionFlag can be used for more logical tagging within scripts. Both are boolean and support true or false values.

So next time you need to quickly jump to a specific perspective in your molecular design workflow, NSL camera filters might just save you a few valuable minutes.

To learn more, visit the full documentation: https://documentation.samson-connect.net/users/latest/nsl/camera/

SAMSON and all SAMSON Extensions are free for non-commercial use. You can download SAMSON at https://www.samson-connect.net.

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