Screenshots

Polyscope includes simple functionality for saving screenshots from the current camera view to disk. The ImGUI interface windows will be automatically hidden when taking a screenshot.

Screenshots can be taken manually by pressing the [screenshot] button in the options GUI window, or programmatically using the functions below. Clicking the GUI button generates a numbered screenshot file in the current directory; the arrow to the side of the button can be used to adjust file format and transparency settings for these screenshots.

It is not necessary to call show() before taking screenshots. You can set up you scene and programmatically configure the camera view, then call screenshot() to save a rendered image to disk, all without any user interaction.

Example: Register a mesh, position the camera, and take a screenshot

import polyscope as ps

# Initialize
ps.init()

# Register a mesh
verts = # ... your data ...
faces = # ... your data ...
ps_mesh = ps.register_surface_mesh("my mesh", verts, faces)

# Position the camera
ps.look_at((0., 0., 5.), (1., 1., 1.))

# Adjust some screenshot default settings if you'd like
ps.set_screenshot_extension(".jpg");

# Take a screenshot
# It will be written to your current directory as screenshot_000000.jpg, etc
ps.screenshot()

# Get the screenshot image as a numpy array
img = ps.screenshot_to_buffer()

include_UI may not match

The screenshot include_UI=True setting is imperfect, the UI will be visible, but may be in a different state compared to what you see in your own window. This is a known bug, and we hope to fix it in future version.

screenshot(filename=None, transparent_bg=True, include_UI=False)

Saves a screenshot to the path given as filename, with format inferred from the file extension.

The extension should be one of .png, or .jpg.

If no name is is given, screenshots are saved to the current directory, with file named like screenshot_000000.png numbered automatically in increasing order. The numbering is reset to 0 for each run of the program; existing files will be silently overwritten.

If transparent_bg is true, the background will be rendered as transparent, and set as transparency alpha in the saved image if the file format supports it.

If include_UI is true, the screenshot with be captured with the ImGui UI (panels, buttons, etc) visible (default: False).

set_screenshot_extension(ext)

screenshot extension

Set the extension used when taking automatically-numbered screenshots, either with screenshot() or by clicking the GUI button.

The extension should be .png, or .jpg.

screenshot_to_buffer(transparent_bg=True, vertical_flip=True, include_UI=False)

screenshot to buffer

Take a screenshot of the current view and return it as a numpy array of (h,w,4).

See screenshot() for the meaning of most arguments.

The openGL buffer layout is vertically-flipped from the usual image convention in Python. The if vertical_flip=True, the buffer is flipped vertically before returning to match the usual convention.