Animation Framework

[elijah]

I've been working within the toolkit to produce some high-quality animations using Gephi and I'd like to start a discussion about how this might one day look as a user-friendly, GUI-driven option for every Gephi user. First, some examples:

Networks in the Humanities (Snippets)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIFmjhK2Qao

A Literary Genome
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4eiLrjNpwRk

The DH11 Conference
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNTzluLAKYY

You can see examples of some of the possibilities in the first video. The second is simply a high-quality animated ForceAtlas2 layout. I think this is very important to give users the ability to show how these networks lay out, given that it has, in my experience, always been considered an important and exciting part of the network analysis experience. The third shows some of the more animation-related possibilities. You can see a Radial Layout graph being rotated (just using the Rotate layout) and then changing the opacity of nodes and edges and finally initializing a different layout and watching the whole thing unfold.

The technical details are pretty straightforward: You run Gephi for a single tick and export a PNG of the graph at that state. Combined with a few handmade tweens, that's it. Oh, and then you drop all the images into ffmpeg or Quicktime Pro and turn that into a movie. The results, I think, are beautiful.

As it stands now, you can easily do anything that happens in your typical Gephi exploration and analysis. The Darwin example shows an Ego Network filter expanding to 10 degrees. There are some obvious issues, such as certain layouts that immediately place the nodes (Radial, Circular, GeoLayout) which need tweens, and conceptually designing ways to highlight certain range and partition values for audiences. In the coming weeks, I'll have some visual examples of my takes on these things.

What I'd like to see in Gephi .12 (or Gephi 3.0 or Gephi Vista or whatever it's called) is a timeline where a user can drop Layout X for a minute then Highlight Features Y then Layout Z for thirty seconds. You'd have the option to see a rough preview of the animation and then, when you're satisfied, a final render (I'm sure I haven't got my own code in good shape, yet, but it took forty minutes to render the Literary Genome).

What do you guys think?

[seinecle]

Beautiful viz! Thx for indicating the steps you followed! I'd have a newby question : when you say "tweens", you are talking about Adobe after effects kind of stuff, right?

[elijah]

Glad you like them, I'll clean up and comment the code and put the various classes up on Github so everyone else can do it. By tweens I just mean generic methods that take a node that has a starting color, position and/or size and an ending color, position and/or size and provide you with a simple transformation over the course of X amount of time so that when you run Geolayout from ForceAtlas2 the nodes don't just splat into their LatLong but rather drift toward them, or when you change size it happens smoothly rather than suddenly.

[mgroeninger]

Hi Elijah,
I know it isn't an animation framework, but I added the ability to do transitions to the radial axis, circular and double circle layouts. You can now enable transition and set a step size in the plugin settings.

It is available in 0.7 of the plugin.

Sorry to crank up an old thread,
Matt