Animate a Rotating 3D Graph in Matplotlib

Animate a rotating 3D graph in matplotlib

If you want to learn more about matplotlib animations you should really follow this tutorial. It explains in great length how to create animated plots.

Note: Creating animated plots require ffmpeg or mencoder to be installed.

Here is a version of his first example changed to work with your scatterplot.

# First import everthing you need
import numpy as np
from matplotlib import pyplot as plt
from matplotlib import animation
from mpl_toolkits.mplot3d import Axes3D

# Create some random data, I took this piece from here:
# http://matplotlib.org/mpl_examples/mplot3d/scatter3d_demo.py
def randrange(n, vmin, vmax):
    return (vmax - vmin) * np.random.rand(n) + vmin
n = 100
xx = randrange(n, 23, 32)
yy = randrange(n, 0, 100)
zz = randrange(n, -50, -25)

# Create a figure and a 3D Axes
fig = plt.figure()
ax = Axes3D(fig)

# Create an init function and the animate functions.
# Both are explained in the tutorial. Since we are changing
# the the elevation and azimuth and no objects are really
# changed on the plot we don't have to return anything from
# the init and animate function. (return value is explained
# in the tutorial.
def init():
    ax.scatter(xx, yy, zz, marker='o', s=20, c="goldenrod", alpha=0.6)
    return fig,

def animate(i):
    ax.view_init(elev=10., azim=i)
    return fig,

# Animate
anim = animation.FuncAnimation(fig, animate, init_func=init,
                               frames=360, interval=20, blit=True)
# Save
anim.save('basic_animation.mp4', fps=30, extra_args=['-vcodec', 'libx264'])

How to rotate a 3d plot in python? (or as a animation) Rotate 3-D view using mouse

You need to define a function in order to get a specific animation. In your case it is a simple rotation:

def rotate(angle):
    ax.view_init(azim=angle)

Then use the matplotlib animation:

rot_animation = animation.FuncAnimation(fig, rotate, frames=np.arange(0,362,2),interval=100)

This will call the rotate function with the frames argument as angles and with an interval of 100ms, so this will result in a rotation over 360° with a 2° step each 100ms. To save the animation as a gif file:

rot_animation.save('path/rotation.gif', dpi=80, writer='imagemagick')

Jupyter | How to rotate 3D graph

To enable interactivity you need to use the notebook backend of matplotlib. You can do this by running %matplotlib notebook.

This must be done before you plot anything, e.g.:

%matplotlib notebook

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from mpl_toolkits.mplot3d import axes3d    

fig = ...

Rotate interactively a 3D plot in python - matplotlib - Jupyter Notebook

Ok I found the answer on another post:

How can I open the interactive Matplotlib window in IPython notebook?.

the following line %matplotlib qt has to be written at the beginning of the script + you have to restart the jupyter notebook and it works

Many thanks for your help guys!

Matplotlib Animation not rendering

I ran into a similar issue before, replacing "%matplotlib inline" with "%matplotlib notebook" in the given code solved it for me.

Animating a 3D vector with matplotlib

quiver does not have an updating function, but you can easily remove an old quiver and plot a new one in each frame.

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from mpl_toolkits.mplot3d import Axes3D
from matplotlib.animation import FuncAnimation

fig, ax = plt.subplots(subplot_kw=dict(projection="3d"))

def get_arrow(theta):
    x = np.cos(theta)
    y = np.sin(theta)
    z = 0
    u = np.sin(2*theta)
    v = np.sin(3*theta)
    w = np.cos(3*theta)
    return x,y,z,u,v,w

quiver = ax.quiver(*get_arrow(0))

ax.set_xlim(-2, 2)
ax.set_ylim(-2, 2)
ax.set_zlim(-2, 2)

def update(theta):
    global quiver
    quiver.remove()
    quiver = ax.quiver(*get_arrow(theta))

ani = FuncAnimation(fig, update, frames=np.linspace(0,2*np.pi,200), interval=50)
plt.show()

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