What is the Workbench doing?

• What does the workbench do?

  The workbench creates animations from QGIS by generating multiple static frames (images) and then combining those frames into an animation. The user tells QGIS how the frames should change from one to the other. In QGIS 3.26 and later the animated markers allow markers to be animated without the use of the expressions system.  

• How do the animated markers work?

  In the code snippet below, the user tells QGIS that as the frame count increments by one the Raster Image Marker should change to the next image in the sequence.

  

  py @project_home || '/fish/fish_00' || lpad(to_string( @frame_number % 32), 2, '0') || '.png'

  The user specifies the path of the image (@project_home/fish/fish_00). Then the lpad(to_string( @frame_number % 32), 2, '0') tells QGIS to convert the frame number to a string and then modulus the number of frames by the number of animation frames (32) (i.e. QGIS divides the number of frames by 32 and then repeats the sequence when the remainder is zero). The 2 and '0' in the snippet tell QGIS to pad the /fish/fish_00 with two zeroes at the end. Finally the '.png' tells QGIS the type of file to finish off the path.  

• Frame Output location on Windows

  For users on a Windows machine who are interested in seeing the frames before they are combined into an animation (GIF or movie) you can find them by going to "C:\Users\Username\AppData\Local\Temp\animation_workbench-0000000000.png". Bear in mind that AppData is a hidden file, so it's preferable to not make changes unless explicitly told otherwise.  

• Frame Output on Linux

  The frames should be in your /tmp directory.