When creating molecular animations to highlight key interaction sites or structural changes, it’s easy to end up with scenes that shift more than needed — sometimes spinning or panning the camera away from your subject. This kind of camera motion can distract your audience and make your message less clear.
That’s where the Zoom Camera animation in SAMSON becomes especially useful. 🎯
Why a Stable Camera Target Matters
Molecular modelers often want to guide the viewer’s eyes to a specific site — for example, the ligand binding cavity, a catalytic residue, or a framework motif in a nanotube. Maintaining a stable target point while zooming helps communicate this effectively. The Zoom Camera animation does exactly that: it modifies only the camera position between frames, but keeps the target point fixed. So the center of the view — the atom, residue, or structure your story revolves around — stays locked, while you smoothly approach it.
This behavior is different from the Dolly Camera animation, which allows both the position and the target to vary but may introduce unexpected shifts in perspective.
Step-by-Step: Creating a Focused Zoom Animation
- Select your start frame in the Animator’s Track view.
- Orient the view just the way you want it using SAMSON’s navigation tools — point the camera exactly where you need it.
- Double-click the Zoom Camera animation in the Animation panel.
- Set the end frame and adjust the final zoom level as needed. The view remains centered on your target throughout.
Tuning Your Animation
Need more control? You can:
- Decide whether to apply the animation to the active camera or a specific one.
- Keep the camera upright — based on whether the grid is enabled — by toggling the Keep camera upwards option.
- Control how zoom acceleration behaves between frames using the Easing curve.
The Animation controllers can be used to fine-tune camera positions, giving you precision in framing and storytelling.
This effect is especially helpful when combining camera zoom with rendering techniques like Fog or Depth-of-field, where the target point plays an essential role in how visual effects are applied.
Visual Example
Using Zoom Camera helps create cleaner, more focused animations that are easier to follow and visually more appealing—especially when you’re trying to communicate structural insight to collaborators, reviewers, or students.
To learn more, visit the original documentation page.
SAMSON and all SAMSON Extensions are free for non-commercial use. You can get SAMSON at https://www.samson-connect.net.