gganimate extends the grammar of graphics as implemented by ggplot2 to include the description of animation. It does this by providing a range of new grammar classes that can be added to the plot object in order to customize how it should change with time. Here we take a simple boxplot of fuel consumption as a function of cylinders and let it transition between the number of gears available in the cars. As this is a discrete split (gear being best described as an ordered factor) we use transition_states and provide a relative length to use for transition and state view. As not all combinations of data are present there are states missing a box. We define that when a box appears it should fade into view, whereas it should shrink away when it disappears. Lastly, we decide to use a sinusoidal easing for all our aesthetics (here, only y is changing) gganimate is available on CRAN and can be installed with install.packages('gganimate').
Features
- gganimate mimics the way ggplot2 renders its output
- Under the hood, the animate() function is called which renders the frame and passes the frames to a renderer functions
- gif is a fantastic format for animations due to its wide support
- Further there’s support for rendering to sprite sheets if that is your vice
- Video output are automatically embedded in RMarkdown documents
- This is the second iteration of the gganimate package
Project Samples
