For molecular modelers, communication often hinges on the clarity and visual impact of shared images. Whether you’re crafting visuals for a publication, presentation, or collaboration, rendering realistic materials can be surprisingly time-consuming. Setting up each surface – glass, metal, or even glowing ligands – manually can disrupt your workflow and dilute scientific focus.
SAMSON‘s integration of the Cycles renderer from Blender addresses this frustration by providing fast photorealistic rendering, plus a collection of material presets that allow molecular modelers to create high-quality visuals with just a few clicks.
Skip the Tweaking: Use Presets
The key to accelerating your rendering workflow is the use of Appearance presets. These presets enable you to assign contextually relevant materials to atoms, molecules, and even imported 3D geometries – all within SAMSON’s Inspector panel.
This simple interface lets you select from a wide range of predefined material categories:
- Metallic: Copper, Silver, Carbon Steel, Zinc, etc.
- Semi-metallic: Brass, Rust, Pearl…
- Smooth: Plastic, Latex, Satin…
- Rough: Concrete, Feather, Velvet…
- Emissive: Choose how strongly the material glows – from Faint to Intense.
- Transparent: Ice, Glass, Jade, Wax, and more.
With just a few clicks, surfaces become visually distinct and scientifically expressive — highlighting differences in molecular structures, domains, or significance, without needing separate visualization software.
Full Control When You Need It
For those who want to fine-tune beyond presets, SAMSON also exposes granular material controls. You can modify individual parameters like:
- Specularity
- Roughness
- Transparency
- Emission strength
This means you can begin with a preset, then adjust only what matters — saving time while preserving flexibility.
Render Examples: From Protein to Polystyrene
The results speak for themselves. Whether you’re rendering a protein-ligand complex with a glowing active site or highlighting the metallic framework of nanomaterials, the Cycles material system helps bring these scenes to life.
When to Use Material Presets
Material presets are useful whenever you:
- Need to quickly generate high-quality visuals for publication or presentation
- Want to visually differentiate structural elements without relying solely on color
- Are importing 3D objects into your molecular scene and want them to match your render style
By minimizing time spent adjusting materials, researchers can focus on what matters: the science behind the scene.
To learn more, visit the SAMSON documentation on rendering.
SAMSON and all SAMSON Extensions are free for non-commercial use. You can get SAMSON at https://www.samson-connect.net.