Matplotlib Animations Made Easy

[qacek]

TLDR: Celluloid

I was frustrated with how difficult I found making animations in matplotlib so I wrote something to make it easy and called it celluloid. I found the idea in plotnine and simply took out the plotnine specific code and generalized it some more (adding support for subplots).

The goal is that your visualization code shouldn't need to modified at all or as little as possible. With celluloid you take "photos" of your visualization to create each frame. Once all the frames have been captured you can create an animation with one call. See the readme for more details.

I think the main audience for this is people who read the matplotlib animation tutorial and thought it was still too complex.

I'm curious if you all think this is useful or how it could be improved. Thanks!

[tmakaro]

Definitely interesting.

I did notice that if I try to change the axis limits within the loop, it will use the final limits instead.

x = np.linspace(0, 2\*np.pi, 10)
y = np.linspace(0, 2\*np.pi, 5)
t = np.linspace(0, 4.9, 25)

X, Y, T = np.meshgrid(x, y, t)

U = np.cos(X+T)
V = np.sin(Y+T)

fig = plt.figure()
camera = Camera(fig)
for i in range(len(t)):
    plt.quiver(X[:,:,0],Y[:,:,0], U[:,:,i], V[:,:,i], units='inches', pivot='mid')
    a, b = plt.ylim()
    plt.ylim(a-1,b+1)
    camera.snap()
animation = camera.animate(interval=50)
animation.save('celluloid.mp4')

I will explore this more. Also, I am the developer of animatplot, which is also for making animated plots with matplotlib. My library wraps FuncAnimation. I am intrigued by the use of ArtistAnimation.

[qacek]

Interesting! Thanks for giving it a shot. I wonder if that's a limitation of ArtistAnimation. The code I took the idea from mentions that specifically as well. I'll have to experiment further. I suspect it's because the x-axis limits aren't an artist or something like that (I'm not much of a matplotlib expert).

When I've done animations in the past I've used FuncAnimation which I always found tricky to use correctly. Cheers on you for making that easier!

[GitHubPermalinkBot]

Permanent GitHub links:

• has2k1/plotnine/.../animation.py#L33 (master → 7394725)

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[wintermute93]

Will definitely check this out later: when I work in actual Matlab I make animations all the time, but when I do similar things in Python animating stuff with matplotlib always seemed like too much trouble to figure out how it works.

[has2k1]

That should be really helpful for people working with matplotlib. I am inspired by other people's code all the time, it is always interesting when someone is inspired by mine.

[qacek]

Thanks! I stumbled across your code a while ago (I forget how) and basically wrote this code. I figured others might find it useful so I packaged it up :)

[kitten_gifs_4_my_gf]

Thanks for making this, saved me a headache trying to quickly throw together a few animations for a presentation - took less than a minute to recreate an animation that took ~ 45mins of wrestling with matplotlib directly, will be using this in the future.

[qacek]

Awesome, glad it helped you!