When creating molecular animations, clarity is everything. Whether you’re preparing a presentation, designing teaching materials, or just trying to isolate a part of your model, hiding atomic structures at the right frame can make a big difference in storytelling and comprehension. But controlling visual transitions effectively — especially hiding complex molecular components at precise times — can be cumbersome, error-prone, or time-consuming.
If you’ve tried manually adjusting transparency or deleting nodes altogether, you’ve likely encountered limitations. Transparency isn’t true disappearance, and deletion is irreversible for animation timelines. Fortunately, SAMSON offers a convenient animation effect that solves this need: the Hide animation.
Why Use the Hide Animation?
The Hide animation in SAMSON allows specific nodes to disappear at any desired moment in your animation timeline. This is done by controlling their visibility rather than their transparency — meaning that the nodes are still part of your model, but they’re visually suppressed from that point onward.
What makes this especially useful is the clean separation of animation phases. The Hide effect uses three keyframes:
- Between keyframes 1 and 2, nodes remain visible.
- At keyframe 2, nodes become hidden.
- Between keyframes 2 and 3, nodes stay hidden.
This provides very intuitive and flexible control over when and how a part of your model disappears, without interfering with spatial positions or requiring transparency juggling.
How to Use It
To add a Hide animation:
- Select the nodes you want to hide. These could be atoms, residues, chains, or even entire molecules.
- Open the Animation panel in SAMSON’s Animator interface.
- Double-click on the Hide effect to insert it into your animation timeline.
- Adjust the positions of the keyframes to match the timing of your story.
You can fine-tune how this animation feels by modifying the Easing curve, so that the transition happens linearly or accelerates/decelerates over time. That gives your visuals an even more polished, purposeful rhythm.
Use Cases
Modelers often use Hide for:
- Focusing attention on a ligand or active site by hiding bulkier surroundings.
- Creating step-by-step visualizations of assembly or binding processes.
- Improving clarity in animations for teaching by progressively introducing or removing molecular parts.
Combined with other animation effects like Appear or Flash, Hide can help you tell cleaner molecular stories, with smooth transitions and no visual clutter.
Learn more in the SAMSON documentation.
SAMSON and all SAMSON Extensions are free for non-commercial use. Get SAMSON here.