When you’re presenting a molecular model or visualizing a simulation result, smooth camera motion plays a key role in capturing your audience’s focus. Whether you’re demonstrating an active site interaction, exploring a supramolecular complex, or producing an educational video, simple pans and transitions can make a big visual difference. But choreographing these camera movements can be frustrating if you’re relying on manual camera controls.
That’s where the Truck camera animation in SAMSON comes in. It’s designed to help you easily create a horizontal movement of the camera between two points, keeping both the camera’s position and its target point aligned — which means that the whole scene shifts laterally, like a slide.
Why use the Truck camera?
Molecular animations often need to follow a pathway, such as scanning along a DNA strand, gliding across a binding pocket, or showing interactions across a protein surface. In such cases, you want to translate the entire view horizontally to avoid distracting perspective changes. The Truck camera moves the camera’s viewpoint and focus together, maintaining the same relative direction and scale while re-framing the system in motion.
Quick Overview of How It Works
The animation is set in the Animator Track View. You’ll start by positioning the camera and choosing the frame where the movement begins. Then, you add a Truck camera animation from the Animation panel.
Behind the scenes, SAMSON records both the camera’s position and the point it’s looking at, and offsets them by the same amount in a horizontal direction. The result is a visually gentle horizontal slide between the start and end frames.
Visual Example
Here’s a preview of what a Truck camera animation looks like when applied in SAMSON:
The movement conveys spatial progression without distorting the structure, making it ideal for transitions that keep your scene consistent.
Adjusting the Animation
The Truck camera effect supports custom adjustments, such as modifying the easing curve to change how the interpolation speed feels (linear, ease in/out, etc.). You can also choose whether it should apply to the active camera or to a different camera, and define how the movement behaves with regard to an optional grid.
To fine-tune positions, you can use animation controllers to adjust exactly how much lateral offset occurs. Keep in mind that the Truck camera effect uses a specific configuration; it assumes a consistent horizontal direction in the camera’s reference frame, and it’s most effective for lateral shifts without tilts.
Final Tip
If you’re combining multiple animations (like rotations or zooms), the Truck camera can be a great way to lead into or out of a sequence — especially if your goal is to pan over or reveal successive parts of a large molecular system.
To learn more about the Truck camera effect, visit the documentation page.
SAMSON and all SAMSON Extensions are free for non-commercial use. You can download SAMSON at https://www.samson-connect.net.