Quickly Selecting Cameras in Complex Molecular Models

If you’re working with complex molecular scenes in SAMSON, you may have multiple cameras saved to record different views or prepare for rendering. Managing those cameras—especially selecting specific ones—can become tedious if you’re not using the Node Specification Language (NSL) efficiently.

Fortunately, SAMSON’s NSL provides an elegant mechanism to identify and work with camera nodes through a dedicated attribute space: camera (short name: ca). With a few short expressions, you can locate, filter, and interact with cameras by name, selection state, and flags. Here’s how to make your workflow smoother.

What Are Camera Attributes?

In SAMSON, cameras are treated as nodes with their own set of attributes. The camera attribute space lets you target them specifically without sifting through irrelevant nodes.

Three key attributes help you zero in on the cameras you need:

• ca.n: the camera’s name
• ca.selected: whether the camera is currently selected
• ca.sf: the selection flag

Use Cases in a Modeling Workflow

Let’s look at how you might use these attributes in practice.

Finding Cameras by Name

If you’ve named your cameras intuitively (e.g., based on what they show), you can search for them using ca.n. For instance:

This will match all camera nodes with the name “TopView”. You can also use wildcard matching:

This will match all camera nodes whose name starts with “L”.

Checking for Selected Cameras

Need to find all currently selected cameras in your scene?

This condition will match all camera nodes that are currently selected. Want the opposite?

Useful when you want to isolate unselected cameras for further operations.

Using Selection Flags

The selectionFlag is an attribute inherited from general node behavior, which helps when scripting or automating tasks. Use:

or

to filter cameras based on custom logic you’ve set in your scene workflow.

Combining Conditions

You can combine criteria for more precise queries. For instance, to find all unselected cameras whose name starts with “L”, use:

This flexibility makes it much easier to manage large simulations with many viewpoints.

Why This Matters

In molecular modeling, camera nodes often represent key perspectives—active sites, binding pockets, or interfaces between molecules. Being able to quickly select or isolate the right camera means less time navigating and more time analyzing. It also helps in scripting reproducible rendering workflows or creating animations based on specific viewpoints.

To learn more, visit the original documentation page: https://documentation.samson-connect.net/users/latest/nsl/camera/

SAMSON and all SAMSON Extensions are free for non-commercial use. You can download SAMSON at https://www.samson-connect.net.