Quickly Find the Right Camera Views in Complex Molecular Models

When working with complex molecular systems, it’s common to save multiple camera views to track different stages of a simulation, zoom in on specific regions of interest, or prepare figures. However, as the number of saved views grows, it can become frustrating to locate the right one quickly. If you’ve ever wasted time manually scanning through camera nodes to find the right perspective, this post is for you.

In SAMSON, you can use the Node Specification Language (NSL) to filter and select only relevant camera nodes based on their attributes. This helps you stay focused and efficient when exploring large molecular models or preparing visual outputs.

Using the camera Attribute Space

In NSL, the camera attribute space—abbreviated as ca—allows you to perform precise queries on camera nodes. Here are three particularly useful attributes:

• name (n): Filter by a named pattern.
• selected: Check whether a camera is selected (no short name).
• selectionFlag (sf): A flag used for marking nodes during selection tasks.

Let’s look at how you can use these attributes with practical examples.

Filter by Name

If you named your cameras meaningfully—say, to indicate function or stage—you can use string matching. For instance:

This matches a camera node named exactly TopView.

This matches all camera nodes starting with Docking, such as Docking1, Docking_final, etc. This is useful if you’re organizing a simulation process step by step.

Identify Currently Active Views

If you want to quickly find which camera nodes are selected:

This will return all selected camera nodes. If you want to find the ones that aren’t selected, just add not:

Mark and Reuse Nodes

The selectionFlag attribute is a persistent way to mark nodes even after the selection changes. This can help you tag cameras for downstream processing or sharing:

This finds all camera nodes with the flag set to true.

You can explicitly query unmarked camera nodes like this:

Usage Tip: Combine Filters

You can combine predicates for more complex queries. For instance, to find camera nodes with names matching Docking* that are not currently selected:

This is especially helpful when cleaning up or preparing publication-quality figures from the right views.

Conclusion

If managing view states in multi-step molecular modeling workflows has been a source of confusion or delay, try using NSL with the camera attribute space. It provides a simple but powerful way to stay organized and retrieve exactly what you need, when you need it.

📖 View the full documentation page to explore more camera attributes and usage examples.

SAMSON and all SAMSON Extensions are free for non-commercial use. You can get SAMSON here.