Matplotlib for Python Developers - Second Edition

Creating animated plot

Matplotlib was not designed as an animation package from the get-go, and thus it would appear sluggish in some advanced usages. For animation-centric applications, PyGame is a very good alternative (https://www.pygame.org) which supports OpenGL- and Direct3D-accelerated graphics for the ultimate speed in animating objects. Nevertheless, Matplotlib has acceptable performance most of the time, and we will guide you through the steps to create animations that are more engaging than static plots.

Before we start making animations, we need to install either FFmpeg, avconv, mencoder, or ImageMagick on our system. These additional dependencies are not bundled with Matplotlib, and thus we need to install them separately. We ...