Animation basics in MATLAB - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Animation basics

📖 Scenario: You want to create a simple animation in MATLAB that shows a point moving along a sine wave. This is useful for understanding how to update plots dynamically.

🎯 Goal: Build a MATLAB script that animates a point moving along the sine curve from 0 to 2π.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a vector of x values from 0 to 2π

Create a vector of y values as sine of x

Set up a figure and plot the initial point

Update the point position in a loop to animate movement

Use pause to control animation speed

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Animating data points helps visualize changes over time, useful in physics simulations, engineering, and data analysis.

💼 Career

Understanding animation basics in MATLAB is valuable for engineers and scientists who need to present dynamic data clearly.

1

Create the data vectors

Create a vector called x with 100 points linearly spaced between 0 and 2*pi. Then create a vector called y where each element is the sine of the corresponding x value.

MATLAB

% Your code here to create x and y vectors

Need a hint?

Use linspace to create evenly spaced points and sin to get sine values.

2

Set up the figure and initial plot

Create a figure window and plot the first point of the sine wave using plot with a red circle marker. Store the plot handle in a variable called h.

MATLAB

x = linspace(0, 2*pi, 100);
y = sin(x);
% Your code here to create figure and plot initial point

Need a hint?

Use plot to draw the point and axis to set the viewing window.

3

Animate the point along the sine wave

Use a for loop with variable i from 1 to 100. Inside the loop, update the XData and YData properties of h to the i-th elements of x and y. Use pause(0.05) to slow down the animation.

MATLAB

x = linspace(0, 2*pi, 100);
y = sin(x);
figure;
h = plot(x(1), y(1), 'ro', 'MarkerSize', 10, 'MarkerFaceColor', 'r');
axis([0 2*pi -1.5 1.5]);
grid on;
% Your code here to animate the point

Need a hint?

Change the XData and YData of the plot handle inside the loop.

4

Display the animation result

Run the script to see the red point move smoothly along the sine wave from left to right.

MATLAB

x = linspace(0, 2*pi, 100);
y = sin(x);
figure;
h = plot(x(1), y(1), 'ro', 'MarkerSize', 10, 'MarkerFaceColor', 'r');
axis([0 2*pi -1.5 1.5]);
grid on;
for i = 1:100
    h.XData = x(i);
    h.YData = y(i);
    pause(0.05);
end
% Run the script to see the animation

Need a hint?

Run the whole script in MATLAB. You should see a red dot moving along the sine curve.