When preparing molecular animations, it’s often necessary to guide your audience through a spatially complex structure. But creating smooth, intentional vertical camera movements — for example, to transition across layers in a membrane system or explore a polymer structure — can be surprisingly difficult. Random jumps or abrupt angles can be distracting and reduce the clarity of your visual storytelling.
If you’ve ever wished for a way to gently raise or lower your camera view without losing focus or realigning everything manually, the Pedestal camera animation in SAMSON provides just what you need.
What is the Pedestal Camera Animation?
The Pedestal camera animation moves both the camera’s position and its target point vertically over time, between two keyframes. This ensures that the center of the view remains constant relative to the scene, while effectively shifting the entire viewport upward or downward. It’s especially useful when exploring layered systems such as protein channels, nanoparticle complexes, or stratified materials.
This type of camera motion differs from other options like the Truck camera, which shifts horizontally, making Pedestal the most intuitive approach for vertical traversals.
Creating a Pedestal Animation
To use the animation, follow these steps:
- Select the starting frame in the Animator’s Track View.
- Set the desired initial orientation of your scene.
- In the Animation panel, double-click the Pedestal camera option.
- Define the end frame, which will automatically shift both the camera and target point vertically by a specified distance.
What’s especially helpful is that both the start and end frames can be adjusted interactively afterward. This makes it easy to fine-tune the movement if the vertical transition needs to be more subtle or more dramatic.
Behavior and Fine Control
By default, Pedestal animations apply to the active camera. If you want to apply it to a different camera, you can adjust this behavior by inspecting the animation and unchecking the Apply to active camera box.
One of the often overlooked but powerful features is the ability to tweak how camera parameters interpolate between frames using different Easing curves. This lets you create smooth slow-ins and slow-outs, improving the overall fluidity of your animation.
You can also control whether the movement operates in relation to the grid (by toggling the Keep camera upwards option). This makes a difference in perspectives where vertical is defined contextually.
Limitations and Adjustments
While general camera positions can typically be adjusted freely between frames, the Pedestal animation does have certain built-in constraints due to its nature: the vertical offset is applied uniformly across the camera’s position and target. This helps preserve orientation but means some manual fine-tuning is limited.
Even so, visual control over the movement and integration with SAMSON’s Animator makes this a robust tool for vertical navigation in molecular scenes.
If your molecular model spans different planes and you want to guide your viewers up or down intuitively, give the Pedestal camera animation a try.
Learn more in the official documentation here: https://documentation.samson-connect.net/users/latest/animations/pedestal-camera/
SAMSON and all SAMSON Extensions are free for non-commercial use. Download SAMSON at https://www.samson-connect.net.