Cloudy with a Chance of...

I got inspired to add another example to my Python noise library. This one creates a real-time animated atmosphere around planet Earth. It uses the GLSL fast fake noise implementation in the library.


(download a higher quality video)

The example uses pyglet. I cooked up a nice little class for capturing frames to png files that can be encoded into a video. It was used to make the above:

class MovieCapture:

    def __init__(self, dirname):
        assert os.path.isdir(dirname), (
            "%s is not a valid directory" % dirname)
        self.dirname = dirname
        self.frame_no = 0

    def capture(self):
        """Capture the current window a file, 
        return the file name"""
        filename = 'frame-%05d.png'
        while os.path.exists(os.path.join(
            self.dirname, filename % self.frame_no)):
            self.frame_no += 1
        mgr = pyglet.image.get_buffer_manager()
        mgr.get_color_buffer().save(
            os.path.join(self.dirname, 
            filename % self.frame_no))
        return filename % self.frame_no

When you instantiate it, you provide a path to a directory to write the captured frames into. Each is written to a sequentially named png file. After drawing each frame, you simply call the capture() method to write it to a new file. Once you've got the frames you need, you can encode them into a movie using mencoder or whatever tool you choose. To make this video I used mencoder like so:

mencoder "mf://atmosphere/*.png" -mf fps=20 -o atmosphere.avi -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=msmpeg4v2:vbitrate=800