mapmate is an R package for map- and globe-based data animation pre-production. Specifically, mapmate functions are used to generate and save to disk a series of global map graphics that make up a still image sequence, which can then be used in video editing and rendering software of the user’s choice. This package does not make simple gif animations directly from R, which can be done with packages like animation. mapmate is more specific to maps, hence the name, and particularly suited to high-resolution png image sequences of 3D globe plots of the Earth.

This is a development package. Available on Github. See the updated tutorial or vignette for plenty of example use cases and more detailed discussion of existing features and functionality.

changes in mapmate 0.0.2 (Release date: 2016-10-26)

• Updated functions, help documentation and examples.
• Refactored introductory vignette.
• Additional unit tests included.
• Change to the behavior of get_lonlat_seq.
• Additional restrictions imposed on acceptable inputs to functions.
• Explicit, required id argument replaced the previously assumed presence of a frameID data frame column.
• No more internal function conversion of id column name to frameID when originally named something else in any of the package functions. Non-standard evaluation is used to avoid dependence on a fixed name.
• Added convenient wrapper function, save_seq, for maps or time series line plots processed in either series or parallel (Linux-only, via parallel::mclapply).
• do_projection has been generalized to operate on data frames containing multiple unique plot frame ID values in the specified id column.
• do_projection has been generalized to output the subsetted data frame with its original columns as before, or with keep=TRUE, the entire input data frame along with an additional boolean inview column.
• Bug fixes

The package also contains a simple Shiny app that displays how package function arguments for longitude, latitude, and rotation axis orientation work together to produce a 3D globe display of the Earth from a user-specified perspective.

devtools::install_github("leonawicz/mapmate")
library(mapmate)
runOrtho()