Creating animation with multiple plots - Octave/Matlab

Question

I'm using Octave to write a script that plots a function at different time periods. I was hoping to create an animation of the plots in order to see the changes through time.

Is there a way to do this so to possibly save each plot for each time in some way that each plot can be combined to create this animation?

Thanks in advance for the advise!

Answer 1

This creates an animated gif

data=rand(100,100,20); %100 by 100 and 20 frames

%data go from 0 to 1, so lets convert to 8 bit unsigned integers for saving
data=data*2^8;
data=uint8(data);

%Write the first frame to a file named animGif.gif
imwrite(data(:,:,1),'/tmp/animGif.gif','gif','writemode','overwrite',...
        'LoopCount',inf,'DelayTime',0);

%Loop through and write the rest of the frames
for ii=2:size(data,3)
     imwrite(data(:,:,ii),'/tmp/animGif.gif','gif','writemode','append','DelayTime',0)
end

Answer 2

It's a bit of kludge, but you can do the following (works here with octave 4.0.0-rc2):

x = (-5:.1:5);
for p = 1:5
  plot (x, x.^p)
  print animation.pdf -append
endfor
im = imread ("animation.pdf", "Index", "all");
imwrite (im, "animation.gif", "DelayTime", .5)

Basically, print all your plots into a pdf, one per page. Then read the pdf's as images and print them back as gifs. This will not work on Matlab (its imread implementation can't handle pdf).