It’s easy to miss an important detail when visualizing complex molecular motions. As a molecular modeler, you might carefully design animations to demonstrate a docking process, a conformational change, or a molecular assembly—but wouldn’t it be helpful to record the actual trajectories traveled by atoms during those animations?
This is exactly what the Record path animation in SAMSON allows you to do. It creates tracks that follow how atoms move over time, giving you a reliable visual representation of molecular motion. Let’s walk through when and how this feature could be useful, and how to make the most of it.
Why record atomic paths?
When working on molecular animations, especially during simulations or interactive transformations, it’s often valuable to preserve the observed motion. Perhaps you’re trying to understand how a ligand found its binding site, or you’d like to show a smooth path followed during manual manipulations. Without a recording, those transient paths can be lost.
By using the Record path animation, SAMSON lets you capture these movements and revisit them later—or even re-play them in reverse using dedicated features.
Adding the Record Path animation
To start recording paths, double-click on the Record path animation in the Animation panel of the Animator. A new keyframe will be placed at the current frame in your animation timeline. Keyframes can be moved at any time to adjust when the recording begins.
Color coding provides visual feedback: green segments show successfully recorded positions, while red segments indicate positions not yet recorded or recently invalidated.
One important tip: the Animator executes animations from top to bottom. This means your Record path animation should be listed after other animations that change atomic positions, like Move atoms or Simulate. Otherwise, paths may be recorded before the atoms actually move.
Performance considerations
Recording paths in real-time can be performance-intensive, especially with complex systems or long animations. Luckily, you can toggle the recording on and off at any point:
- Use the Inspector to enable or disable recording.
- Right-click on the Record path animation in the Animator to switch the recording state.
When recording is disabled, the animation’s controllers in the Animator become darkened, signaling that paths are no longer being captured.
Exporting the paths
Once the path recording is complete—meaning all segments are green—you can create a Path node in your document. This node represents the trajectory and can be reused or analyzed further.
There are two ways to create the path:
- Click Create path in the Inspector of the Record path animation.
- Right-click the animation in the Animator and choose Create path.
Using this approach, you can design animations that not only look good in presentations but also help you analyze and reuse molecular motion for further simulations or visualizations.
Want to dig deeper or explore related features? Check out the full documentation for Record path in SAMSON.
SAMSON and all SAMSON Extensions are free for non-commercial use. You can download SAMSON at https://www.samson-connect.net.