How to | Create Animations
Animations can convey much more information than static displays. The built-in Mathematica functions Animate and ListAnimate provide an immediate way to construct animations of graphics or any other kind of expression in a Mathematica notebook. There are many other ways to interact with animations, including using interface-building tools like Manipulate and Dynamic, or file manipulation tools like Import and Export.
Use Animate to animate a picture of 
for changing values of 
:
| Out[107]= |  |
Mathematica can animate any expression, not just graphics. Here, Animate scans through integer powers of a polynomial. The DefaultDuration option specifies how long the animation should take from start to finish, in seconds:
| Out[1]= |  |
Use ListAnimate to animate a list of objects. Setting the AnimationRunning option to False prevents the animation from starting automatically:
| Out[110]= |  |
For continuous ranges, Manipulate includes animation controls, which are hidden by default. Show them automatically by setting the Appearance option to 
. Notice that you can animate multiple variables at once:
Pass a list of graphics or any other expression to Export to create an animation in an "SWF", "AVI", "TIFF", or animated "GIF" file. Export will also create an animation instead of a list when given a Manipulate, Animate, or ListAnimate:
| Out[37]= |  |
Import a "QuickTime", "AVI", "TIFF", or animated "GIF" file with 
to obtain a list of images in the animation:
| Out[38]= |  |
Import just a single frame of the animation:
| Out[39]= |  |
| Out[40]= |  |
The Animator control can be used directly to dynamically control an animating variable, outside the structure of Animate or Manipulate:
| Out[22]= |  |
| Out[23]= |  |
A Dynamic that automatically changes itself is effectively a self-contained animation. DynamicModule localizes and stores the value of the variable counter:
| Out[31]= |  |
The Clock function can also be used in Dynamic to drive a time-based animation. Here is a disk which changes color from Hue
to Hue
every 20 seconds:
| Out[49]= |  |
