Creating smooth and informative molecular animations often means guiding your audience’s eyes exactly where you want them to look. Whether you’re rotating around a binding site or zooming through a channel, camera movement is critical. However, many molecular modelers find themselves manually re-orienting views between frames, resulting in jerky transitions or inefficient workflows.
The Move camera animation feature in SAMSON provides a solution. It lets you set keyframes along a timeline, between which the camera’s position and orientation are smoothly interpolated. This makes it simple to choreograph fluid, continuous movement through molecular structures — all without having to manipulate every frame.
Adding a keyframe-based movement
The key concept is the use of keyframes, which mark specific frames in your animation where the camera should be in a particular position and orientation. Once a Move camera animation is added, you can insert as many keyframes as needed:
- Orient your view by interactively rotating, zooming, or translating the camera.
- In the Animator’s Track view, navigate to the frame where the camera should stop.
- Left-click in the animation track to add a keyframe immediately, or right-click and choose “Add keyframe”.
This approach gives you fine control over the path of the camera, letting you build complex transitions, like flying into a binding pocket or panning across a molecular surface.
Adjusting and removing keyframes
Since animations are dynamic, you might want to reposition or delete keyframes. Simply drag them along the timeline to change when they occur, or right-click on an unwanted keyframe and select “Remove keyframe”.
Controlling animation behavior
Behind the scenes, SAMSON interpolates between the camera’s positions and orientations at each keyframe. But that’s not all — you can:
- Apply the camera movement to a specific camera (not just the active one) by inspecting the animation properties.
- Toggle ‘Keep camera upwards’ to control whether the up direction is enforced (useful when moving relative to a grid or surface).
- Choose an easing curve, which defines how motion is interpolated — linear, smooth, etc.
Use case: Fly through a molecule
Let’s say you want to create a fly-through animation of an enzyme’s active site. You would:
- Set a keyframe outside the enzyme where the view begins.
- Move the camera inside the cavity and insert a second keyframe.
- Optionally add intermediate keyframes to curve the path or change angles.
The result is a guided, cinematic experience ideal for educational videos and presentations.
For real-world examples using this technique, check out this fly-around animation or this visualization of NU1000.
Learn more in the official SAMSON documentation for the Move camera animation tool: documentation.samson-connect.net.
SAMSON and all SAMSON Extensions are free for non-commercial use. You can download SAMSON at www.samson-connect.net.