g.gui.animation(1grass)

💖 g.gui.animation 💖

okay bestie, so g.gui.animation is the GRASS Animation Tool and she is that girl. It's a wxGUI component — literally the module you reach for when you wanna animate a whole series of raster or vector maps, or a space time raster or vector dataset. She's part of the GRASS User's Manual and I'm gonna walk you through her like we're texting at 2am. 🦋

✨ KEYWORDS ✨

general, GUI, display, animation — like, the whole vibe in four words 💅

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

g.gui.animation
g.gui.animation --help
g.gui.animation  [raster=name[,name,...]]   [vector=name[,name,...]]
[strds=name]   [stvds=name]   [--help]  [--verbose]  [--quiet]  [--ui]

🎀 Flags:

• --help — prints the usage summary, i.e. a lil cheat sheet, no cap
• --verbose — verbose module output, she's telling you everything
• --quiet — quiet module output, she's giving minimalism 🌈
• --ui — force launches the GUI dialog. no arguments, just vibes

🫶 Parameters:

• raster=name[,name,...] — the raster maps you wanna animate, comma-separated, lowkey obsessed
• vector=name[,name,...] — the vector maps to animate. OR it can be data source(s) for direct OGR access, so she's flexible 💅
• strds=name — a space time raster dataset to animate, iconic
• stvds=name — a space time vector dataset to animate, also iconic

🔥 DESCRIPTION 🔥

The Animation Tool is a wxGUI component for animating series of GRASS raster or vector maps or space time datasets (created by t.* modules). periodt.

Animation Tool allows you to:

• display up to 4 synchronized animations 🤯
• each animation can consist of base map layer(s) and (multiple) series in arbitrary order (for example, raising water level with elevation)
• control the animation speed
• interactively change active frame using a slider
• visualize space time datasets with unequally spaced intervals
• animate 3d view (partially implemented, not supported on Windows) ⚠️
• export animation as a series of images, animated GIF, AVI or SWF
• choose format of time labels in case of animating maps with absolute time
• choose background color
• set starting and ending region in order to change region during animation (alternatively you can set N-S/E-W values instead of the ending region; these are used for making the region smaller or larger for each step)

3D view animation enables to animate raster (as an elevation map or a color map) or vector map (points, lines). Internally, module m.nviz.image is used. To display 3D view animation follow these steps:

• open GRASS GUI, load maps and start 3D view
• set view, light and other parameters as you like
• save workspace file
• add new animation in Animation Tool, choose 3D view mode
• choose data (series of maps or space time dataset) used for animation
• set workspace file
• choose parameter (parameter of m.nviz.image) to animate (e.g. color_map)

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🧚 NOTE 🧚

The Animation Tool follows the computational region settings, so please be sure your computational region is set to the geographic extent of maps you are animating. You can change the computational region (using g.region) and then reload the maps to update the animation.

bestie pls don't skip this one, if your region is off your animation is gonna be giving chaos 😭

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💜 EXAMPLES 💜

g.gui.animation raster=rmap1,rmap2,rmap3
g.gui.animation vector=vmap1,vmap2,vmap3
g.gui.animation strds=precipitation_2000_2010

The loading of a series of maps into the Animation Tool can be simplified with g.list (back ticks syntax works for Linux and Mac only):

g.gui.animation raster=`g.list type=raster mapset=. separator=comma pattern="precip*"`

Using extended regular expressions, the list of a series of raster maps can be subset by e.g., numeric range (here: precipitation for the years 1997-2012):

g.gui.animation raster=`g.list -e type=raster mapset=. separator=comma pattern="precip_total.(199[7-9]|200[0-9]|201[0-2]).sum"`

like the regex ate and left no crumbs fr fr 🔥

👑 SEE ALSO 👑

wxGUI, wxGUI components

g.gui.timeline, g.list, m.nviz.image

See also related wiki page.

🌟 AUTHOR 🌟

Anna Kratochvilova, Czech Technical University in Prague, Czech Republic 🎀

💖 SOURCE CODE 💖

Available at: wxGUI Animation tool source code (history)

Accessed: Tuesday Sep 08 11:56:21 2026

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and that's the whole thing, bestie 🫶 this was GRASS 8.5.0, accessed Tuesday Sep 08 11:56:21 2026, © 2003-2026 GRASS Development Team, GRASS 8.5.0 Reference Manual — slay, now go animate something gorgeous 💅✨