Animations

Simple animations of frames and trajectories are easy to implement with Matplotlib’s FuncAnimation. The following example will generate a frame that will be rotated about the x-axis. The image shown on this page is not animated, but you can run the script from the example folder.

"""
================
Animate Rotation
================

Animates a rotation about the x-axis.
"""
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from mpl_toolkits.mplot3d import axes3d
import matplotlib.animation as animation
from pytransform3d.plot_utils import Frame
from pytransform3d import rotations as pr


def update_frame(step, n_frames, frame):
    angle = 2.0 * np.pi * (step + 1) / n_frames
    R = pr.passive_matrix_from_angle(0, angle)
    A2B = np.eye(4)
    A2B[:3, :3] = R
    frame.set_data(A2B)
    return frame


if __name__ == "__main__":
    n_frames = 50

    fig = plt.figure(figsize=(5, 5))

    ax = fig.add_subplot(111, projection="3d")
    ax.set_xlim((-1, 1))
    ax.set_ylim((-1, 1))
    ax.set_zlim((-1, 1))
    ax.set_xlabel("X")
    ax.set_ylabel("Y")
    ax.set_zlabel("Z")

    frame = Frame(np.eye(4), label="rotating frame", s=0.5)
    frame.add_frame(ax)

    anim = animation.FuncAnimation(
        fig, update_frame, n_frames, fargs=(n_frames, frame), interval=50,
        blit=False)

    plt.show()