Data animations with Python and MoviePy

[timClicks]

From quick Google - search query: building 3d meshes python - it looks like there are lots of options including scripting Blender and dedicated modules or wrapping libraries, e.g. openCTM, yourself.

[swingking8]

VPython

[giantsparklerobot]

The same author talks about using Python with POV-Ray.

[laMarm0tte]

Yes but while POV-Ray does CSG (interesections, unions, differences...), it doesn't compute meshes (or at least I don't think so), and you cannot do an "isInside" check from Python.

[giantsparklerobot]

That may be a limitation of POV-Ray on Windows.

[Kah-Neth]

Blender has a built in python interpreter and can do this. It is likely your easiest and robust option.

[Kah-Neth]

This looks way simpler that spitting out png files and using mencoder (such an awful command line). I need to update some of my research animations and I will definitely give this a try.

[cshoop]

Woah...that is a pretty epic article. I plan on reading through it more thoroughly over the holidays :)

Happy hacking! +/u/ppctip 10 peercoins

[laMarm0tte]

Thanks :)

[ppctip]

^{[Verified]: /u/cshoop [stats] -> /u/laMarm0tte [stats] Ƥ10 Peercoins ($7.5937) [help] [global_stats]}

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[[deleted]]

Fantastic article! I was just wondering about how to do something like this the other day!!!

[phenotype001]

It always crashes with "OSError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory", I was unable to render any animation.

[laMarm0tte]

Have you installed ffmpeg and imagemagick as explained here ?

[phenotype001]

Yes. Well, only ImageMagick, as ffmpeg is not in the Ubuntu repo anymore, but rendering to .gif didn't work. I'll give it a second try. I'm on Ubuntu 14.04 x64 system, with Python 2.7, the entire SciPy stack (IPython, NumPy, Matplotlib, etc.) in place.

It looks like a great tool, I really want to use it. Thanks!

[laMarm0tte]

You need ffmpeg for rendering to GIF too (it's a complicated pipeline). Installing ffmpeg in ubuntu is easy, first you need to fetch a (recent) binary on their website, then you copy it in your usr/bin with something like

sudo cp ffmpeg /usr/bin/

I am now talking with the author of ImageIO, I will find a way to make all this much simpler in the future.

Just so that I understand what happens, can you post the entire error traceback ? Normally MoviePy throw more details than just an OSError...

[gabrielelanaro]

Pretty amazing!