When working with complex molecular systems, clarity can make all the difference. Whether you’re preparing a visual presentation, creating educational content, or just trying to understand your model better, sometimes you need to peel apart layers of atoms and structures to see what’s going on underneath. That’s where the Disassemble animation in SAMSON can help.
The Disassemble animation does precisely what you’d expect: it takes a group of structural nodes or meshes and automatically moves them apart from each other. This creates a clear, exploded view that helps to visualize the internal organization of molecular systems. It’s particularly helpful in presentations or demonstrations when you want to emphasize the relationships among components of a molecular assembly — for example, to show how protein subunits interact with ligands or cofactors.
When to Use Disassemble
This animation is useful in several scenarios:
- Communication: You want to present your molecular model to students, collaborators, or stakeholders and need a way to make complex assemblies more understandable.
- Exploration: You’re analyzing a large biomolecular assembly and need to isolate individual components.
- Animation creation: You’re producing a molecular movie that explains a mechanism and want to highlight sub-structures progressively.
How It Works
Here’s a step-by-step summary of how to apply the Disassemble animation in SAMSON:
- Select the nodes or meshes you want to separate visually. If you don’t select anything, SAMSON will make its best guess based on the context.
- Open the Animator and navigate to the Animation panel.
- Double-click on “Disassemble” to add the animation between two keyframes.
- Adjust keyframe positions to control the timing of the separation.
SAMSON automatically computes how far elements should move, but you have control:
- You can change the amplitude of movement through the Inspector.
- You can set how the motion interpolates between frames by adjusting the Easing curve.
- Keyframes can be freely repositioned to define exactly when and how the disassembly happens over time.
Important Tips
The Disassemble animation gives better visual results when applied to logically grouped elements, such as:
- Protein domains
- Chains in multimeric complexes
- Ligands and cofactors around active sites
Also, remember that you can combine Disassemble with other animations in SAMSON to create more comprehensive presentations, such as zoom-ins, highlights, or rotations.
Keep in mind: the Animation menu referenced in some older tutorials is no longer present. Animations, including Disassemble, are now found exclusively in the Animation panel inside the Animator.
Want to See It in Action?
SAMSON Connect offers public presentations that include disassemble-style effects, like:
By incorporating the Disassemble animation into your workflow, you make complex molecular structures more accessible — for others, and for yourself.
To learn more, visit the original documentation page: https://documentation.samson-connect.net/users/latest/animations/disassemble/
SAMSON and all SAMSON Extensions are free for non-commercial use. You can get SAMSON at samson-connect.net.