When building scientific presentations or molecular animations, there’s often a need to maintain a specific viewpoint of a system across several frames. This is particularly true when showcasing the progression of a simulation, comparing different ligand dockings, or simply keeping the visual narrative coherent.
However, during editing and exploration, it’s common to unintentionally change the camera view. And suddenly, your carefully curated movie includes jarring viewpoint jumps. If you’ve ever found yourself frustrated by inconsistent camera angles in a molecular animation, the Hold Camera feature in SAMSON offers a simple solution.
Why Hold the Camera?
When you’re not using other camera animations at certain frames, SAMSON’s default behavior allows the camera view to change if you’ve interacted with the scene in any way. This might lead to sections of your movie that are visually inconsistent — an issue particularly troubling when you’re aiming for high-quality visualizations of molecular processes.
The Hold Camera animation effect in SAMSON ensures continuity by freezing the camera parameters between two frames. It’s like placing a fixed tripod for your virtual camera: what you see at the beginning will persist through the specified duration.
How to Use Hold Camera
Here’s how to lock your viewpoint between two keyframes in SAMSON:
- Open the Animator’s Track view and select your desired start frame.
- Orient your camera to the exact view you want to preserve. This could be a zoomed view of a binding pocket, a global view of a macromolecule, or any other perspective.
- In the Animation panel, double-click on Hold camera to add the effect.
- Set the end frame — this defines how long the view will be maintained.
You can adjust the start and end frame positions afterward, so there’s flexibility if your animation timeline evolves.
When Should You Use It?
Use Hold Camera whenever you need a consistent camera perspective across animation segments. For example:
- You’re presenting structural transitions and want the viewer to focus on the same region of a molecule throughout.
- You’re integrating multiple animations and wish to avoid accidental camera drift between sections.
- You want to lock the view while using other object or label animations that should be viewed from the same perspective.
Tip: SAMSON used to include an Animation menu for this purpose, but it’s now streamlined into the Animator panel. All animation types, including camera-related ones, are available there.
Having precise control over how your molecular models are presented is essential for clarity and storytelling. The Hold Camera effect is a small but valuable tool that ensures stability in your scene visuals without the need to re-adjust views constantly.
To explore this feature further, visit the official SAMSON documentation page: https://documentation.samson-connect.net/users/latest/animations/hold-camera/
SAMSON and all SAMSON Extensions are free for non-commercial use. You can download SAMSON at https://www.samson-connect.net.