com.travelanimator/mcp

Travel Animator MCP

Describe a trip. Get a video of it.

Travel Animator MCP lets an AI assistant plan a route, style the animation and render it to an MP4 on your machine — the route drawing itself as it is travelled, a 3D vehicle following it, map labels, country flags, and the distance badge the mobile app draws on top.

You say: "Make me a 20-second video of a road trip from Lisbon to Porto to Braga, on the Terrain map, with a red line and a car."

Your assistant: creates the project, adds the three stops, follows real roads between them, sets the map and line style, renders, and hands back the path to the MP4.

More prompts that work — and what it won't do — in examples/prompts.md.

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Install

Two commands. The second one is not optional — a stdio MCP server cannot prompt you for credentials, so you log in once in your own terminal.

Claude Code

claude mcp add travel-animator -e TADA_SOURCE=readme -- uvx --from "travel-animator[mcp]@latest" travel-animator mcp
uvx travel-animator login

Claude Desktop, Cursor, VS Code, Codex, or any client that takes JSON

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "travel-animator": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["--from", "travel-animator[mcp]@latest", "travel-animator", "mcp"],
      "env": { "TADA_SOURCE": "readme" }
    }
  }
}

…then uvx travel-animator login in a terminal.

@latest re-resolves on every launch, so restarting your client is all an update needs. Without it uvx reuses whatever it first cached, and you stay on that version.

TADA_SOURCE tells us which instructions you followed. Optional — delete it if you like.

Already have Python? pip install "travel-animator[mcp]" and use travel-animator as the command. Python 3.12+.

Per-client instructions, including the "works in the terminal but not in the desktop app" PATH fix, are in docs/clients.md.

What you need

Python	3.12 or newer
Account	The same Travel Animator account as the mobile app. A free account can log in, browse the catalogues and author a project — only a premium account can render one.
Platform	macOS (Apple silicon), Linux (x86-64, arm64), Windows (x64). These are the four wheels published; other platforms — including Intel macOS — are not supported.
Disk	The wheel is ~85 MB. It carries its own Java runtime and, on macOS and Windows, its own graphics driver — there is nothing else to install. Linux uses the system GLES driver, or Mesa for software rendering.
Network	Rendering is not offline: map tiles, glyphs and sprites are fetched as frames are drawn, then cached under ~/.cache/tada/render.

If your machine can't render at all, the server says so up front — before you build a project it can't finish — and can fall back to a server-side render.

What it can make

• 34 map styles — Terrain, Satellite, Sketch, Glow, Comic, Winter, Pixel, Watercolor and more (list_maps). One is free; the rest need premium.
• 355 3D models — land, air and water, from realistic cars and planes to an elephant (list_models). 11 are free.
• 7 route line styles — solid, dashed, dotted, striped, glow, transparent, auto (list_line_styles).
• Two projections — flat MERCATOR or a 3D GLOBE with stars, a sun and a moon.
• 9–60 second videos, at your choice of aspect ratio and resolution.
• Real roads or straight lines, per segment.
• Place labels, country flags, a distance badge, avatars and per-point effects.

How it works

create_project → create_route → update_animation_state → render_video → await_render → MP4

Two things worth knowing, because they change how your assistant behaves:

• Nothing is edited implicitly. Every tool takes an explicit project_id. There is no "current project", so an assistant can hold several trips open without confusing them.
• Projects are durable local state, under $XDG_STATE_HOME/tada-render/projects/<id>/ (~/.local/state/… if unset). Videos land in that project's renders/; the newest five per project are kept and older ones pruned. Close your assistant and the project is still there tomorrow.

Tools

30 tools. Full reference with parameters in docs/tools.md.

Group	Tools
Check first	get_capabilities · auth_status
Projects	create_project · list_projects · get_project · delete_project · import_project · export_project
Route	create_route · get_route · add_point · update_point · remove_point · clear_route · set_real_route
Look & feel	get_animation_state · update_animation_state · list_maps · list_models · list_line_styles
Render	estimate_render · render_video · await_render · get_render_progress · get_render_result · cancel_render
Account sync	list_account_routes · save_project_to_account · load_account_route · delete_account_route

Renders report progress as they go. render_video returns immediately with a session id; await_render waits on it and, if the render is still going, returns a line your assistant reads out — frames done, percent, time left — and waits again. A ten-minute render is not a ten-minute silence.

Routes sync to the phone. save_project_to_account puts a route in the mobile app's Saved Routes. It carries waypoints only — the reply's dropped list names what didn't survive (avatars, effects, extra model slots, local media, the animation settings), and your assistant should tell you rather than report a clean save.

Privacy Policy

The full policy — covering the apps, the website and this package — is at travelanimator.com/privacy-policy; it has a section of its own for the MCP server and CLI. What follows is that section in brief.

Usage analytics are opt-in and off until you turn them on. Nothing is collected before that, and nothing at all is collected outside the MCP server.

travel-animator analytics status   # what is set, and what it covers
travel-animator analytics on       # grant consent
travel-animator analytics off      # revoke, effective immediately

Never collected — unconditionally, whatever your consent says: route coordinates, place labels, route annotations, file paths, your media, the contents of any route you save or load, the names you give projects, and what a tool returned. A route records where somebody has actually been.

Collected with consent: which tools were called, in what order, how long they took and whether they failed; render settings (resolution, duration, animation style, map, vehicle); the number of points in a route and the set of countries it crosses.

One free-text exception: when an assistant asks for a tool this server doesn't have, the sentence it writes describing what it was trying to do is collected with that request (up to 2048 characters) — that is the only way a server learns which capability it is missing. It is never attached to an ordinary tool call. Analytics are processed in the United States by a third-party provider.

Command line

The MCP server is one of two front ends. The CLI is the other:

travel-animator login           # log in: magic link, or a bearer token for CI
travel-animator logout          # remove credentials stored on this machine
travel-animator analytics       # show, grant or revoke analytics consent
travel-animator render-bundle   # render a prepared render bundle to MP4
travel-animator mcp             # run the MCP server (needs the mcp extra)

render-bundle renders bundles produced by the Travel Animator service; it does not create them. The MCP server is the only path that goes from nothing to a finished video.

Troubleshooting

Symptom	Cause	Fix
Tools fail with a "log in" message	No credential on this machine, or it expired	travel-animator login in a terminal, then retry
Login works, rendering is refused	Free account	Rendering needs premium
Server doesn't start from a desktop app	GUI apps don't inherit your shell PATH	Use the absolute path from which uvx
pip install fails on your Mac	Intel macOS has no wheel	Apple silicon, Linux or Windows only
Render fails on a machine with no GPU	No usable GL	Call get_capabilities first; use the server-side fallback
Second render refused	One render at a time, per project and per process	Wait, or cancel_render

More, including error codes, in docs/troubleshooting.md.

Support

Open an issue — please include your OS, travel-animator --version, your MCP client, the tool that failed and its error_code. Or email connect@travelanimator.com.

Licence

This is not open-source software. The travel-animator package ships under a limited use licence: you may install and run it unmodified to prepare and render Travel Animator content and to talk to Lascade's services. You may not redistribute it, modify it, or build a competing service with it. The full terms ship inside the package at tada_render/LICENSE.

Bundled fonts, flag artwork and the libraries inside the renderer are third-party works under their own licences, listed in tada_render/THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md. For redistribution or modification rights, contact Lascade.

The documentation and examples in this repository are MIT — see LICENSE.

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