In my 3D scatter plot animation, everything runs smoothly until I introduce a slider to the figure. At that point, new frames are drawn on top of older ones, resulting in overlapping frames (see attached image). Due to my limited understanding of how FuncAnimation works, I am unable to pinpoint what exactly is causing this issue.
Below is an elaborate description of how I execute the animation:
The animation is managed within a class called MyAnim. Upon initializing the class, I first create the 3D figures by:
class MyAnim(object):
"""Animates points on 3D wireplot"""
def __init__(self, [...]):
[...]
self.fig = plt.figure(figsize=(8,8))
self.subplot = self.fig.add_subplot(111, projection='3d')
self.subplot._axis3don = False
I then run the anim method of MyAnim, which initiates the animation loop:
def anim(self):
"""Sets the animation loop"""
frames = [...]
self.anim = animation.FuncAnimation(self.fig, self.animate3d, frames, init_func=self.init, interval=50, blit=False, repeat=False)
In the self.init function, I set up an initial dummy scatter plot with a single transparent point at zero.
def init(self):
"""Animation initialization"""
self.subplot_3d_wires = self.subplot.scatter([0], [0], [0], c=RED, s=100, alpha=0)
return [self.subplot_3d_wires]
The animation itself involves updating the position of the wire plot's grid points (next_pos) as well as drawing new positions for red (x_red, y_red, z_red) and blue (x_blue, y_blue, z_blue) scatter points on top of the wire plot.
These components of the plot are handled as follows:
def animate3d(self, i):
plt.cla()
[...]
next_pos = get_next_pos(i)
[...]
for j in range(X_SIZE ** 2):
step_l = (j) * Z_SIZE
step_r = (j + 1) * Z_SIZE
self.subplot_3d_wires = self.subplot.plot_wireframe(next_pos[step_l:step_r, 0],
next_pos[step_l:step_r, 1],
next_pos[step_l:step_r, 2],
rstride=1,
cstride=1,
alpha=0.2,
antialiased=True)
[...]
(x_red, y_red, z_red) = get_new_red(i)
(x_blue, y_blue, z_blue) = get_new_blue(i)
self.subplot_3d_wires = self.subplot.scatter(x_red, y_red, z_red, s=150, c=RED, depthshade=False, lw=0, alpha=1)
self.subplot_3d_wires = self.subplot.scatter(x_blue, y_blue, z_blue, s=150, c=BLUE, depthshade=False, lw=0, alpha=1)
[...]
return [self.subplot_3d_wires]
I intend to gradually replace the animation with a slider bar (referencing a related question), so initially, I plan to add a slider using
from matplotlib.widgets import SliderI have attempted to instantiate the slider using:
axcolor = 'lightgoldenrodyellow'
axtime = plt.axes([0.25, 0.1, 0.65, 0.03])
self.stime = Slider(axtime, 'Time', 0.0, 100.0, valinit=50.0)
both in the __init__ method of the MyAnim class and when starting the init function for the animation, but they yield the same undesirable outcome.
What steps am I overlooking here? Any assistance would be greatly appreciated!