When creating molecular animations, especially for presentations or educational videos, camera movement plays a crucial role in guiding the viewer’s attention. One common challenge in this workflow is how to create clean zoom effects without shifting the focus or disturbing rendering settings like fog or depth of field.
This is where the Zoom camera animation feature in SAMSON becomes useful. It allows you to generate a zoom effect by adjusting only the camera’s position, while keeping the target point (what the camera looks at) static. This ensures that rendering effects tied to the focal point aren’t accidentally disrupted.
Why it matters
Let’s say you’re building a showcase animation where you slowly zoom into the active site of a protein. If the target point moves during the zoom, effects like fog and depth-of-field might shift, resulting in a less polished or confusing visual. This could also mislead the viewer about what they’re supposed to focus on.
Using the Zoom camera animation helps you avoid this problem entirely. It’s especially helpful for:
- Focusing gradually on a specific molecular region ✨
- Maintaining cinematic effects during a zoom
- Maintaining the same focal point from start to end
How to use the Zoom camera animation
- Choose your start frame in the Animator’s Track view.
- Orient your camera exactly as you want the zoom to begin.
- Double-click the Zoom camera animation in the Animation panel.
- Set the desired end frame for your zoom.
You can modify the camera’s positions later if needed, and the entire animation continues to use the same target point. This makes it extremely efficient for animators trying to preserve a clear, undistracted visual path through a scene.
Additional tips
- By default, the animation applies to the active camera. You can inspect the animation and uncheck Apply to active camera if you want to target a different one.
- Use the Keep camera upwards property to handle situations when grid settings are on/off, which affects vertical alignment.
- Enhance fluidity during zooms by customizing the Easing curve property.
Here’s an example of what the Zoom camera animation looks like in action:
All Zoom camera animations can be combined with other effects and transitions in SAMSON’s Animator module, giving you flexibility to tell a molecular story just the way you want.
To learn more, visit the full documentation page: Zoom camera animation.
SAMSON and all SAMSON Extensions are free for non-commercial use. You can get SAMSON at https://www.samson-connect.net.