Animating ggplot with gganimate and gifski
Overview
Teaching: 10 min
Exercises: 0 minQuestions
How do I animate my tracks?
Objectives
Isolate one individual and animate his paths between receivers using gganimate and gifski.
You can extend ggplot with gganimate to generate multiple plots, and stitch them together into an animation. In the glatos package, we’ll use ffmpeg to make videos out of these static images, but you can also generate a gif using gifski.
## Chapter 6: Animating plots ####
# Let's pick one animal to follow
st1<-st %>% filter(tag.ID=="A69-1601-30617") # another great time to check hydration levels
an1<-bgo %>%
fortify %>%
ggplot(aes(x, y, fill=z))+
geom_raster()+
scale_fill_etopo()+
labs(x="Longitude", y="Latitude", fill="Depth")+
theme_classic()+
theme(legend.key.width=unit(5, "cm"), legend.position="top")+
theme(legend.position="top")+
geom_point(data=st %>%
as_tibble() %>%
distinct(lon, lat),
aes(lon, lat), inherit.aes=F, pch=21, fill="red", size=2)+
geom_point(data=st1 %>% filter(tag.ID=="A69-1601-30617"),
aes(lon, lat), inherit.aes=F, colour="purple", size=5)+ # from here, this plot is not an animation yet. an1
transition_time(date(st1$dt))+
labs(title = 'Date: {frame_time}') # Variables supplied to change with animation.
Now that we have the plots in an1, we can animate them by handing them to gganimate::animate()
# an1 is now a list of plot objects but we haven't plotted them.
?gganimate::animate # To go deeper into gganimate's animate function and its features.
gganimate::animate(an1)
Notably: we’re doing a lot of portage! The perils of working in a winding river system, or around land masses is that our straight-line interpolations plain look silly when you animate them this way.
Later we’ll use the glatos package to help us dodge land masses better in our transitions.
Key Points