When creating molecular animations, showing how parts come together can be just as important as showing structure or function. Whether you’re preparing educational content, a presentation, or a research video, it’s often useful to illustrate how a complex molecular system can assemble itself into its known configuration.
This is where the Assemble animation in SAMSON becomes relevant. Rather than having to manually animate components moving into position, this tool automatically generates a smooth assembly animation from dispersed components into a final, coherent structure.
Why this matters
As a molecular modeler, you’ve likely faced the challenge of making your molecular presentations engaging and clear. Static visuals often fail to convey spatial organization or the relative movement of parts. Animations help address these limitations, but creating them can be time-consuming. The Assemble animation provides an automated solution by handling the spatial movement for you.
How it works
Here’s how you can create an assemble animation in SAMSON:
- Select your system: Choose a group of structural nodes or meshes that you’d like to see assemble.
- Apply the Assemble animation: Double-click the Assemble effect in the Animation panel of the Animator.
- Customize keyframes: The animation is placed between two keyframes. You can adjust these based on your desired timing or storytelling flow.
- Tweak amplitude or interpolation: Want more control? You can inspect the animation to modify how far starting positions are from their target, and adapt the Easing curve to control animation smoothness.
Watch the animation in action
Here’s an example from the documentation, showing an animation of structural nodes assembling themselves into a predefined configuration:
Use cases
- Educational presentations: Show students how domain components form a protein.
- Conference visuals: Animate RNA folding or ligand-receptor complex formation step-by-step.
- Project documentation: Demonstrate intermediate configurations during an optimization or design cycle.
Animation parameters aren’t fixed. You can modify them to reflect different assembly paths, speeds, or spatial organizations. This gives you a way to convert standard structural data into understandable, dynamic visuals that reflect tension, trajectory, or mechanical assembly logic simply and effectively.
To learn more about SAMSON’s Assemble animation and explore further examples (including some live documents), visit the official documentation page:
https://documentation.samson-connect.net/users/latest/animations/assemble/
SAMSON and all SAMSON Extensions are free for non-commercial use. Download it from the official site: https://www.samson-connect.net