terrain-route-video

What This Skill Does

The Terrain Route Video skill allows you to generate professional-grade, minimalist terrain-style animated driving route videos without requiring external video editing suites or complex rendering platforms like Remotion. By leveraging the OSRM (Open Source Routing Machine) API for precise road-following geometry and OpenTopoMap for stunning topographical basemaps, this skill creates high-fidelity visuals suitable for travel storytelling, logistics visualization, or geography presentations. It processes geographical data—either via stop-based JSON sequences or pre-defined GPX/KML tracks—to render a fly-follow camera experience with dynamic route drawing and precise coordinate tracking. Using Matplotlib for frame composition and FFmpeg for high-speed encoding, it provides a performant path to creating 1600x900 resolution videos.

Installation

To integrate this skill into your OpenClaw environment, execute the following command in your terminal: clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/jack4world/terrain-route-video

After installation, ensure your environment is configured for Python 3.10+. Create a working directory, initialize a virtual environment, and install the required dependencies: numpy, matplotlib, pillow, and requests. The script automatically handles local caching of tile imagery and frame sequences to minimize redundant network requests.

Use Cases

• Travel Documentation: Transform a list of cities visited on a road trip into a cinematic fly-over video.
• Logistics & Supply Chain: Visualize delivery routes or shipping paths across challenging terrain.
• Hiking & Cycling Analysis: Import GPX files from wearable devices to relive outdoor adventures on an animated topographical map.
• Educational Content: Create engaging geographic animations for classrooms or social media content.

Example Prompts

1. "Create a video showing my trip from Paris to Nice. I have the stops in a stops.json file, please use the default dark terrain style and make the video 15 seconds long."
2. "I have a GPX file of my recent mountain bike ride named 'trail_ride.gpx'. Can you generate a fly-follow route video for it?"
3. "Please generate a road-following map video for a delivery route through the Alps. Make the labels extra clear and use a 1600x900 resolution."

Tips & Limitations

• Optimal Geometry: For the best results when "hugging" highways, always provide the full OSRM geometry via the stops.json input and avoid external route simplification.
• Visual Tuning: If the map looks too dim, use --basemap-contrast 1.20 or --overlay-alpha 0.25 to improve legibility.
• Performance: While the script is efficient, generating very long routes (multi-day journeys) will increase memory usage during the frame rendering phase. Use the --no-follow flag for static, full-route overviews to reduce rendering complexity. Ensure you have FFmpeg installed on your system path, as it is the critical engine for the final video encoding.