Create animated graphs in a GIFfy

Although animated GIFs are "so 90s", they are quite handy for use in presentations as they work out of the box in Powerpoint (on Windows anyway), or alternatively, they can be displayed in the browser of your choice.

Here's an animated GIF I created to show the progress of a Genetic Algorithm towards creating a molecule with a specific electronic structure (for more details on the background, see these posts [1] and [2]):

To make this sort of animation, the first step is to make a set of graphs. I use Matplotlib from Python for plotting, so I have a loop looking something like the following:

vals = range(0, 10) + range(19, 100 ,10)
for N in vals:
     homo, trans = self.xy[N]
     lumo = [x+y for x,y in zip(homo,trans)]
     pylab.title("Generation %d of 100" % (N+1,))
     pylab.plot(trans, lumo, ".")
     pylab.savefig("pictures/animation%02d.png" % N)
     pylab.clf()

You can then use ImageMagick to do the PNG to animated GIF conversion. ImageMagick is a bit like Open Babel - it is a one-stop shop for file format conversion, plus it can do a whole set of transformations, and furthermore can be accessed as a programming library. It is available cross-platform (I used it on Windows). The main binary is called "convert", and the conversion is done as follows:

convert.exe -delay 20 -loop 0 animation*.png GA_animation.gif

You can also specify different timings for every frame as I did above. I wrote a little script to help with this: