Crafting clear, visual molecular presentations often requires more than just beautiful molecules — context is important. If you’ve ever found yourself wishing your molecular animations could flow more smoothly between informational slides or contextual backgrounds, SAMSON’s Set background animation can help.
Scientific presentations typically alternate between high-detail molecular views and annotations or slides for explanation. Managing this transition manually — switching between tools or overlaying images in post-production — can be tedious. The Set background animation in SAMSON offers a smoother approach, allowing users to blend molecular animations with presentation slides, images, or custom background transitions, all from within the platform.
What is the Set background animation?
This feature in SAMSON lets you change the background of your animation between two keyframes. It’s especially useful when you want to:
- Transition between different styles of scenes (e.g., lab image, slide, dark background for focus)
- Add explanatory slides behind molecules for context
- Guide viewers through a story with changing visual environments
Even better, if you’re using multiple background animations in one sequence, SAMSON will automatically interpolate between them. This means smooth transitions instead of hard cuts — no external video editing required.
How to use it
To add a Set background effect:
- Open the Animator.
- Double-click Set background in the Animation panel.
- This creates a begin keyframe at the current frame. Move the keyframes to modify when the background appears or changes.
Each animation includes two keyframes:
- Start keyframe: Sets the selected background image or color.
- End keyframe: Ends the background, potentially transitioning into a new one if another Set background animation follows.
Choosing the right background behavior
When inserting images as a background, SAMSON allows you to choose:
- Contained: Ensures the whole image is visible in the background, possibly leaving margins.
- Cover: Makes the image fill the background completely, even if parts are cropped.
In the Inspector, you can also select the Easing curve to control the nature of the transition between keyframes — whether it fades in quickly, slowly, or linearly.
Why it matters
Imagine presenting an allosteric mechanism while naturally transitioning to an overview slide showing experimental data or a reminder of key residues. The background transitions are not only clean and aesthetic, but they also help your audience stay oriented and engaged.
This feature saves time by keeping everything within SAMSON and eliminates the need for external video tools to merge slides and molecular animations. It makes scientific communication through animations just a bit easier and more seamless.
To learn more, visit the full documentation for the Set background animation.
SAMSON and all SAMSON Extensions are free for non-commercial use. You can download SAMSON at https://www.samson-connect.net.