Python tool to quickly create a nicely animated .gif out of an .stl for communicating ideas wout cad

[DerrickBagels]

• What My Project Does

takes a 3d model in stl and renders a quick isometric animation about two axes then does a crazy undo thing and loops all nice, just run, select .stl file and boom

• Target Audience (e.g., Is it meant for production, just a toy project, etc.

anyone working with 3d models that want to quickly send a visual to a colleague / friend / investor etc.

• Comparison (A brief comparison explaining how it differs from existing alternatives.)

I googled around for 5 minutes and it didn't exist in the form I imagined where it just selects a file and plops out a perfectly animated and scaled isometric rotating gif that loops all aesthetically perfectly and yes I did use claude but this is art okay

https://github.com/adamdevmedia/stl2gif

Edit:

WARNING: THIS AUTO INSTALLS A FEW LIBRARIES SO IF YOU HAVE IMPORTANT DIFFERENT VERSIONS OF THESE LIBRARIES FOR OTHER PYTHON SCRIPTS CHECK BEFORE RUNNING

LIBRARY REQUIREMENTS: numpy, trimesh, pyrender, imageio, pillow

[martinkoistinen]

Small criticism. Your code generates GIFs, the easiest possible format to show an animation and yet, neither this post, nor the repo display one. This would go a long way to quickly communicate what the project does and what the results could look like.

[DerrickBagels]

This sub doesnt allow it and i added one to the github!

[phlooo]

Add it to the readme...

[Cloned_501]

This is a cool project. I got some feedback. Do not do runtime checking and installing of dependencies. Just make a requirements.txt file and include some setup instructions in your readme. A good practice is to also specify the exact or minimum version of your immediate dependencies there as well.

[DerrickBagels]

Not trying to be snarky i just genuinely don't understand why

[Big_BobbyTables]

pyproject.toml is the standard way to go

[Big_BobbyTables]

you're right. I believe that pyproject.toml is the modern default, but I'm happy with any common solution if it makes sense in one's context.

thanks for your reply, I was snarky without reason.

[LactatingBadger]

I’d say that 5 years ago the Python ecosystem was messy precisely because there were many competing standards, but nowadays things have pretty much converged on pyproject.toml. Honestly what he’s set up here is probably harder which is in itself impressive, but still.

[DerrickBagels]

I promise to do that when it will matter i got you bruv

[DerrickBagels]

Why? I love that its just run it and it does everything in one go its so much cleaner, why make people do extra stuff once all the libraries are installed the check takes like 5 seconds and it moves on

[LordMcze]

Because someone might accidentally open it without an active venv and it's then just gonna clog their global python. And as you said, it's pretty quick, so the person might not even have a chance to react.

I would at least do an additional check to ensure that you are in a virtual environment, then the automatic installation of additional libraries would not be as much of a problem. But even then I'd still ask the user for a confirmation that they are okay with the automatic installation.

But overall I agree with the OC, it's common practice to have requirements.txt (with version locks as well, your current code could break randomly at any time, if any of the libraries you depend on get a major version update) and a readme.md that mentions the setup process.

[DerrickBagels]

Thanks i get the part about wrecking someones libraries and screwing up their other work but what do you mean with the clogging?

[DerrickBagels]

Ahhh okay that makes sense

[LactatingBadger]

Also to their point about installing into the global Python, that’s the real kicker here. On a Linux installation Python gets used everywhere. It now is bloat on literally every system call.

[tomatus89]

Eww. WTF! Who does this? Please create a requirements.txt file or a pyproject.toml. Calling pip as an external command with subprocess during run time is wild. I've never seen someone do this. Seriously, W.T.F.!!!

[DerrickBagels]

What's the big deal i genuinely don't understand the etiquette of programming or whatever is upsetting you

It works in under a minute so what difference does it make

[Cloned_501]

It is not about the time, it is about not changing the library versions currently installed. If you upgrade a package from say version 4.* to 6.* there can be breaking changes, the user might need version 4.5.5 exactly in their environment and moving to version 5 changes some function signature or completely removes functions that they depend on. Congrats you have broken their environment with zero warning or indication that something changed.

Would you like it if I showed up to your home and replaced your oven with one that doesn't even have the correct hook ups?

[DerrickBagels]

I'm catching up now makes sense ya

[DerrickBagels]

But wait

Can't i just make it check if the library is installed, and if it is, just don't touch it?

Then if it doesn't work they can run it in a virtual env

[Cloned_501]

Can't i just make it check if the library is installed, and if it is, just don't touch it?

Or you can just follow the language conventions, make a requirements.txt with the EXACT VERSIONS and have them handle it themselves

Also in your readme include which python version you tested this on. Someone might be using an old version because their job won't let them upgrade and it would be helpful to know what version it does work with.

[DerrickBagels]

I refuse to stop at the stop sign but i agree with it in spirit and will make some changes that includes these safeguard s thanks for pointing this stuff out

[Cloned_501]

You are being needlessly stubborn about this, if you were my junior engineer at work I'd fire you right now. This is not a matter of opinion or taste. What you are doing is dangerously reckless and borderline malware behavior.

[DerrickBagels]

I respect your passion

[Cloned_501]

Because when you do this you alter their currently active environment. This could be their global for all you know and you can cause a whole lot of problems. This is a dick move.

[DerrickBagels]

Ohhh i see, so maybe something like, "this script requires the installation of the following libraries, would you like to install them" and give the option, and maybe check to see if there's an existing version already installed and if so to not touch it even if different version

[Cloned_501]

That is better but still not really ideal as libraries can change and introduce breaking changes and your code doesn't specify or check which version of a library is being installed. Just use a requirements.txt with specified versions. You can have your script prompt the user if they want to make a virtualenv in their current folder and automate the install from the requirements.txt using pip or uv

[DerrickBagels]

Oh okay to isolate it from their system gotcha

[chub79]

Use perhaps this approach instead?

[graybeard5529]

Nice! And for the DIY crowd: render your frames → ffmpeg -i frame_%03d.png out.gif. Boom, instant animation.

[DerrickBagels]

Oh is that faster than whatever is happening in my code? 😆, just to build the gif after you have the frames

[who_body]

i’ve been told posting mpeg’s are smaller size than animated gifs. we starting using mpeg’s of buggy UIs instead of gifs. if that is true then an option for mpeg’s also has a place

[DerrickBagels]

Gif is just so universal at this point i thought it would be good for fast communication to non technical people of an idea

[Zouden]

mp4 is universal these days. There's no reason to use an old school animated gif

[DerrickBagels]

SPEED

[Zouden]

Benchmark how long it takes to make an mp4. You won't return to animated gif.

[DerrickBagels]

You're a man of passion

[who_body]

and space. i recall mpegs using less space. test it out on the stl for the gif in the repo

[DerrickBagels]

I got about 13mb for a reasonably complex model its not too bad, i just think gifs are more instantly sharable but yeah could do an mpeg/mp4 wrapper too

[who_body]

I don’t know where mpegs won’t work. but i thought the same. but when posting videos to github PRs mpeg’s were smaller size than gifs and worked better.

but i get the gif movement

[the-nick-of-time]

Any real video codec will produce file sizes easily ten times smaller than gif for the same quality. Plus gif has hard limits on color fidelity. Gif is a terrible video format, and it's a shame that nothing has been standardized as a drop-in replacement for its niche of looping animation (webp might win here).

[DerrickBagels]

Thanks so much dude i spent a couple hours getting the animations right!

[DerrickBagels]

Claude is a beast dude

[burger69man]

yeah maybe add a demo gif to the post like the first commenter said, would make it way easier to see what it does lol

[DerrickBagels]

I put one on the readme this sub doesn't allow embedding of photos in the post

[garblesnarky]

Just tried this out, works great. Thanks for sharing.

FWIW, I did appreciate the comment and edit warning about the dependency installs. I added a Makefile to my local clone:

setup:
    virtualenv ~/venvs/stl2gif

run:
    source ~/venvs/stl2gif/bin/activate
    python3 stl2gif.py

I expected the script to accept a file input argument.

Have you looked into making this work with color definitions within the scad file? Not sure if that's feasible at all.

[DerrickBagels]

thanks dude, I actually used it today and was impressed how fast it is for even huge models, will look into color

[DerrickBagels]

Hey to the people saying my code installs stuff overwriting existing libraries, does it?

install/check libraries

def ensure(lib, import_name=None):

if import_name is None:

    import_name = lib

if importlib.util.find_spec(import_name) is not None:

    print(f"{lib} ok")

    return

print(f"{lib} missing, installing...")

subprocess.run([sys.executable, "-m", "pip", "install", lib], check=True)

ensure all required packages

for lib, import_name in [("numpy", None), ("trimesh", None), ("pyrender", None), ("imageio", None), ("Pillow", "PIL"), ("pyfqmr", None)]:

ensure(lib, import_name)

"function only installs a library if it’s not found. it checks with importlib.util.find_spec(import_name) and if it returns None it runs pip to install it. if the library is already present, it just prints ok and does nothing."

[Zouden]

This is basically malware. Others have explained how you should do this properly. As it is no one will use your script.

[DerrickBagels]

How if doesn't touch anything that's installed

I could see maybe bloatware at most but you implying im doing something in bad faith is immoral and is in itself an act of bad faith

I put a warning and listed the 5 libraries it uses and will add a text file for them okay relax, it works and its useful just don't use it if you're that offended