One recurring challenge in molecular modeling is managing the clarity of complex scenes during presentations and animations. Whether you’re showcasing a molecular mechanism or preparing a tutorial for students, ensuring that only the relevant molecular parts are visible at any given time keeps your audience focused — and avoids cognitive overload. SAMSON, the integrative molecular design platform, offers a useful solution with its built-in Hide animation effect.
If you’ve ever struggled with toggling visibility manually or felt limited by transparency effects that leave ghosted objects in the frame, you might find the Hide animation particularly useful. Instead of merely reducing opacity, it fully removes selected nodes from visibility at a specified point in your animation timeline — and crucially, keeps them hidden for the desired interval.
When and Why to Use the Hide Animation
The Hide effect is ideal when you want to:
- Remove background or non-relevant structures after an introduction to focus on a specific interaction or region.
- Clean up the animation timeline by reducing clutter after initial visualization.
- Transition between segments without having to manually manage visibility state across multiple frames.
For example, in a protein-ligand interaction demo, you may want to reveal the protein and ligand first, highlight some key residues, and then hide non-essential parts of the protein so the ligand dynamics can be emphasized. Done manually, this can lead to timeline complications or inconsistent visuals. With Hide, it becomes a single, clean step.
How the Hide Animation Works
The Hide animation is a three-keyframe effect that fully removes selected nodes from the scene during the animation:
- Between keyframes 1 and 2: the nodes stay visible.
- At keyframe 2: the nodes disappear from view.
- Between keyframes 2 and 3: the nodes remain hidden.
This effectively combines two steps — “Shown” and “Hidden” animations — into one, reducing redundancy and saving time. You can adjust the timing of the disappearance simply by dragging keyframes along the timeline.
How to Add a Hide Animation
- Select the nodes you wish to hide.
- Navigate to the Animation panel in the Animator.
- Double-click on the Hide animation to apply it to the selection.
To adjust the dynamics of the transition, you can also edit the easing curve, which determines how smoothly the property interpolation behaves over time.
Things to Keep in Mind
- Unlike transparency-based approaches,
Hideensures that nodes are fully removed from the scene and cannot be clicked or selected while hidden. - There’s currently no need to use the older “Animation” menu — everything resides conveniently within the Animator panel.
- Don’t forget you can always move keyframes later to fine-tune the visual timing.
Learn more about the Hide animation effect in the official documentation.
SAMSON and all SAMSON Extensions are free for non-commercial use. You can get SAMSON here.