Animate in Drawbot, without exporting .gif …

[fooness]

Hello everyone,

I had a look at various drawbot animation examples and I wondered if it’s somehow possible to test the animation in drawbot before exporting single frames to a .gif file …

Thank you very much!

[fooness]

Think of this as setup(), update(), and draw() in Processing and p5js, or openFrameworks.

[frederik]

I dont see the difference between showing the animation and generating, those are basically the same

DrawBot has a workflow and originated from pdf with pages. The idea to glue pages as frames to form an animation is a nice artefact.

you can actually script your own setup(), update() and draw() callbacks.

def setup():
   # setup 

def draw():
   # draw here

setup()
draw()

good luck!!

[fooness]

Thank you, @frederik … but I fear I don’t quite understand what you mean. Please let me elaborate on this.

For example, there’s this beautiful variable animation piece of code by @rutherfordcraze.

How would I achieve to see this animation in the canvas, i.e. to update the drawn page with a newly generated one?

[frederik]

The 'preview' view only shows the pdf. The animation is generated from the pdf where pages are frames.

You can preview/open the animation at the end of your script with:

# draw something

path = "path/to/my/animation.gir"
saveImage(path)

# open the animation
import os
os.system(f"open -a Safari {path}")

[fooness]

Thank you, @frederik! I’ll try to get used to this.

[andyclymer]

While I'm working on an animation I run the script once to save the .gif file to the disk, then I select the file and hit the space bar to open it in Quick Look to preview the animation. I leave this preview window open in the Finder while I continue to work on editing the script in DrawBot — every time the file gets updated with a newly saved .gif it will automatically start previewing the new version. Kind of a strange technique but it works!