mpl_animation

A module to create line, color and scatter animations in matplotlib using an intuitive declarative syntax. Contributions/suggestions are welcome!

This is an example of what you can create with a few lines of code.

The examples sub-directory shows how to make line, pcolor and scatter plots. There's a quick start example of a line plot below. https://github.com/braaannigan/mpl_animation/tree/master/mpl_animation/examples

Installation

This is a tentative release of the module. To use it you can:

pip install mpl_animation

or clone from the github source:

1. Clone this repository to your machine

git clone https://github.com/braaannigan/mpl_animation

2. Confirm that you have numpy and matplotlib installed
3. To do a quick test navigate to the mpl_animation directory and run an example

python examples line_example.py

The module is Python3 only. The reason for this is that Python3 has a better syntax for including default and optional arguments and keyword arguments to functions. Re-factoring to allow Python2 would mean breaking the link with the underlying matplotlib args and kwargs function call.

Quick start

To see the module in action:

import mpl_animation.anim as anim
import numpy as np

# x-axis of plot
x = np.arange(0,2*np.pi,1e-1)
# time-axis of plot
t = np.arange(0,8*np.pi,1e-1)

# Use meshgrid to create the data to be plotted
# (anim.plot can also accept 1D coordinate arrays)
T,X = np.meshgrid(t,x)

# Create data - a propagating cosine wave
cos_wave = (t/t.max())*np.cos(X - T)

# Create a title for each frame
titles = ['Wave at time {:.02f}'.format(i) for i in t]
# Create the plot object
cos_line = anim.plot(x, cos_wave, titles = titles)

# Animate the object
anim.animate(cos_line,figsize=(10,7))

Saving to disk as mp4 file

To save a movie to disk as an mp4 file you add the keyword argument anim_save='movie_name.mp4' to the anim.animate() function. In this case the movie will not be shown on the screen. You need to have ffmpeg to save movies to disk. Anaconda users may be able to do this with

conda install -c menpo ffmpeg

Can you animate contour plots?

You can't animate contour plots at the moment. I don't think there is an equivalent matplotlib plotting method for contour plots i.e. there is no equivalent method to set_data() for line plots or set_array() for pcolormesh plots.

Can you overlay plots in a single subplot

This is a target for a future version.

Is there a way to stop the title being partially cut off?

I hope so! All of the solutions I've found to this require modifying the rcparams, let me know if you have a way of doing so within the plotting routine.