Layer Animation

For raster and shapefile layers under the tabs Relief and Maps, the option "enable animation" exists. If it is enabled, the settings from the configure animation dialog are used. For height layers, the animation result can optionally be used as a new transparent overlay, that can be colored with active color mapping and the [Configure Color Map] dialog.

It is possible to create an animation by blending between multiple raster files. The raster files have to be loaded by Biosphere and all except the first raster have to be set to invisible. Now after selecting the first layer and opening the dialog, all the other layers can be added in the order they should be used with "+ add layers". Each added layer is shown in a row with a - button to remove layers from the animation and to the right with a time setting that sets the time that is used for blending from the previous to this layer in seconds. This blending mode works also for shapefiles.

The second animation mode works only with gray scale raster files. By opening the dialog for such a raster, one can set a table to map grey scale pixel values to new values according to the current animation time. The table comes from a ASCII csv file that uses semicolons to separate columns and a sample looks like this:

Time	600	500	400	300	160
0	0.0	0.4	0.9	4.8	11.5
2	0.0	0.4	0.7	4.2	10.8
4	0.0	0.3	0.6	3.7	10.0

The first row lists the original pixel values that should be mapped, values that aren’t listed are interpolated linearly. All other rows start with a time stamp in seconds followed by the final value that the pixel value from the first row should take at this time, e.g. at second two, an original pixel value of 400 will be mapped to a value of 0.7.

The loaded table is shown in the dialog, it can be removed with "clear existing mapping". For relief layers, the mapped value can represent the final height for the terrain. For maps layers, the values can be colored with active color mapping and the [Configure Color Map] dialog.