wxGUI.animation(1grass)

💖 wxGUI.animation — the Animation Tool (that's wxGUI.animation(1grass) bestie, straight out of the GRASS User's Manual) ✨

okay so. imagine your maps but they MOVE. that's this. it's the wxGUI Animation tool and it lives inside the GRASS GUI. no cap. 🎬

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🌈 DESCRIPTION 🌈

The Animation Tool is a wxGUI component for animating series of GRASS raster or vector maps, or space time datasets (the ones made by t.* modules). it's giving cinema. 🍿

The Animation Tool lets you do ALL of this:

• 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 the 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 the 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 🦋

3D view animation enables you to animate a raster (as an elevation map or a color map) or a vector map (points, lines). internally, the module m.nviz.image is used. 👀

To display 3D view animation, follow these steps, bestie:

• 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.

fr fr, set your region first. do not skip this step. i'm serious. 💀

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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"`

regex girlies stay winning. 🧚

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👀 SEE ALSO 👀

• wxGUI, wxGUI components
• g.gui.timeline, g.list, m.nviz.image

See also related wiki page.

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👑 AUTHOR 👑

Anna Kratochvilova, Czech Technical University in Prague, Czech Republic

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🎀 SOURCE CODE 🎀

Available at: wxGUI Animation tool source code (history)

Accessed: Tuesday Sep 08 11:56:21 2026

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okay that's the whole vibe check done 💅 this was GRASS 8.5.0, © 2003-2026 GRASS Development Team, GRASS 8.5.0 Reference Manual — go make something move, bestie, and remember: the region comes first. mwah. 🍓🫶💜