If you’ve ever worked on complex molecular systems where multiple animations coexist—conformations, simulations, or visual transitions—you’ve probably encountered an all-too-familiar dilemma: how do I quickly hide or show specific animation elements without manually toggling through a long list of nodes?
This blog post introduces a fast and systematic way of handling visual clutter by using the visible and visibilityFlag attributes in SAMSON’s Node Specification Language (NSL), tailored specifically for animation nodes. These tools are especially useful when you’re preparing presentations, creating clean screenshots for publication, or simply trying to make sense of a complex molecular timeline.
Why visibility control matters
Imagine you’re working with a biomolecular animation involving several motion paths and conformational changes. Over time, your document accumulates animations from earlier iterations, alternative hypotheses, or exploratory steps. Trying to hunt down each one manually to configure what’s visible? That gets tedious fast.
Instead, NSL allows you to script and query the visibility of animation nodes in seconds. And more importantly, it gives you the power to batch-edit filters by combining conditions. This not only saves time, but also reduces human error during visual preparation steps.
What you’ll use
In animation space (an), the visible (an.v) and visibilityFlag (an.vf) attributes determine what is shown in the viewport:
an.v: Whether the animation node is currently visible.an.vf: Whether the visibility flag is set (used to lock or force visibility state).
These attributes accept boolean values: true or false. And because they are inherited from general node attributes, NSL queries can be both powerful and readable.
Practical examples
Let’s say you want to hide all visible animation nodes:
|
1 |
not an.v |
Conversely, to display only animations with visibility enabled:
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1 |
an.v |
You can combine this with name filters if your animation nodes follow a naming convention:
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an.v and an.n "Cycle*" |
To check visibility flag status:
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an.vf</code><br><code>an.vf false |
This way, you can easily script control over hundreds of animation nodes, for example in preparation for rendering movies or teaching modules.
Limitation to keep in mind
It’s worth mentioning that the visible and visibilityFlag attributes are inherited from general node behavior. As such, they cannot directly animate the visibility itself (e.g., fade in/out over time), but they provide essential logical control for setup, filtering, and analysis steps.
TL;DR
If you’ve ever found yourself buried in too many animation nodes in SAMSON, mastering an.v and an.vf can be a real shortcut to clarity. Whether for sharing, teaching, or analyzing, a well-controlled visual setup is just a few lines of NSL away.
Explore the full documentation for NSL animation attributes.
SAMSON and all SAMSON Extensions are free for non-commercial use. You can get SAMSON at https://www.samson-connect.net.