view-animator 0.1.0

Animate the camera view for a variety of environments

View Animator

This package allows you to programmatically change the camera view for a variety of environments (for example pybullet simulation, and RViz visualization).

Installation

TODO after packaging for PYPI

Usage

The core of it is an animator object and its update() method. You can either update() the animator manually, or automatically in a separate daemon thread.

Example automatic orbiting animation

from view_animator import animate_view_in_background
from view_animator.pybullet_animator import PybulletOrbitter
import pybullet as p

p.connect(p.GUI)
# other simulator configurations

# animate an orbit in the background at a distance of 0.5 away from the origin
orbiter = PybulletOrbitter(update_period=0.01, dist=0.5, target=(0, 0, 0))
animate_view_in_background(orbiter)
# set up objects

p.setRealTimeSimulation(1)
while True:
    # do sim computations
    time.sleep(0.001)

Manual updating of an RViz orbiter

from view_animator.rviz_animator import RVizOrbiter
import rospy

orbiter = RVizOrbiter(period=5, world_frame="world")
rate = rospy.Rate(1 / orbiter.update_period)
while not rospy.is_shutdown():
    # visualization and other processing
    orbiter.update()
    rate.sleep()

Animators

While you can subclass view_animator.base_animator.ViewAnimator directly to suit your specific environment and desired animation, there are a few predefined animators listed below. Note that you do not have to have the environment installed to install this package.

Pybullet

Install pybullet with pip install pybullet

• view_animator.pybullet_animator.PybulletOrbitter for orbitting around a position with fixed pitch at a constant rate

RViz

Requires the rviz_animated_view_controller plugin that can be installed with

sudo apt install ros-<ros-distro>-rviz-animated-view-controller

e.g.

sudo apt install ros-noetic-rviz-animated-view-controller

• view_animator.rviz_animator.RVizOrbitter for orbitting around a position with fixed pitch at a constant rate