Volume Spin

Imaris-style continuous 3D spin animation controls for napari, with looping GIF/MP4 export

Imaris-style continuous 3D spin animation controls for napari, with looping GIF/MP4 export

This napari plugin was generated with copier using the napari-plugin-template.

napari-volume-spin demo

napari-volume-spin adds a Volume Spin Controls dock widget with three tabs that mimics Imaris's continuous 3D rotation animation:

Spin Controls tab

Play / Pause a continuous spin of the 3D camera around the currently viewed volume.
Choose the screen-relative rotation axis: X (pitch), Y (roll), or Z (yaw).
Adjust spin speed (0.05–5.0 degrees/frame) via a linked slider and spin box.

Export tab

Export a looping GIF or MP4 of the current axis/speed settings: a full 360° rotation is captured automatically so the animation loops seamlessly, and you are always prompted for the save location.
Loop Axis: for multi-dimensional images (e.g. a time series), pick an extra (non-displayed) axis to page through frame-by-frame while the camera keeps spinning — the number of captured frames then matches that axis's length instead of a fixed 360° rotation, and the FPS field controls playback speed of the resulting file.
A progress bar and Cancel button are shown while frames are captured; the (often slower) file encoding step runs in a background thread so napari stays fully interactive.

Compress tab

Compress Animation... shrinks an existing GIF/MP4/WebP/MOV/AVI file. Choose a compression scheme — WebP or MP4 use lossy, per-frame (JPEG-like) image compression instead of GIF's 256-color palette, which avoids the choppy banding/dithering artifacts a plain palette-based GIF produces. Compression automatically tries progressively lower scale/quality tiers until the output is under 25 MB (handy for e-mail attachments), while never dropping below 24 fps.

Open napari with a 3D (or higher-dimensional) volume layer and switch to 3D display (ndisplay=3).
Open Plugins > napari-volume-spin: Volume Spin Controls.
On the Spin Controls tab, pick a rotation axis and speed, then click Play Spin to start the continuous animation.
Switch to the Export tab, choose GIF or MP4, an FPS, and optionally a Loop Axis (for multi-dimensional images), then click Export Looping Animation.... Use Cancel to abort mid-capture.
If the resulting file is too large (e.g. for e-mail), switch to the Compress tab, pick a compression scheme, and click Compress Animation... to save a smaller copy.

You can install napari-volume-spin via pip:

pip install napari-volume-spin

If napari is not already installed, you can install napari-volume-spin with napari and Qt via:

pip install "napari-volume-spin[all]"

To install latest development version:

pip install git+https://github.com/Macl-I/napari-volume-spin.git

Contributions are very welcome. Tests can be run with tox, please ensure the coverage at least stays the same before you submit a pull request.

Distributed under the terms of the BSD-3 license, "napari-volume-spin" is free and open source software

If you encounter any problems, please file an issue along with a detailed description.

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