How to create animated scatter plot that plots all the points one by one?

Hello, I am rather new to Matlab. I am trying to make a scatter plot that plots all of the points one by one like an animation instead of all at once, while maintaining the other properties (including the colormap) that I have assigned to it. The code plots points along the longitude and latitude axis, and the points are color coded according to the colormap based on the "concentration" values. Below is the code without the animation. Thank you so much.

 figure;
colormap(customMap);
axes('position',[0 0 1 1]);
plot1 = scatter(lon,lat,30,concentration,'.');
xlim([lonMin lonMax]);
ylim([latMin latMax]);
set(gca,'Color','none');
set(gca,'CLim',[0, 1E-4]);

Answer 1

[Chad Greene]

Try this. First plot the very first point by lat(1),lon(1)

figure;
colormap(customMap);
axes('position',[0 0 1 1]);
plot1 = scatter(lon(1),lat(1),30,concentration(1),'.');
xlim([lonMin lonMax]);
ylim([latMin latMax]);
set(gca,'Color','none');
set(gca,'CLim',[0, 1E-4]);

Then loop through the remaining points, changing the data each time:

for k = 2:length(lat) 

     plot1.XData = lon(k); 
     plot1.YData = lat(k); 
     plot1.CData = concentration(k); 

     % pause 2/10 second: 
     pause(0.2)
  end

Or if you want to keep the old points as you add new ones, do this:

for k = 2:length(lat) 

     plot1.XData = lon(1:k); 
     plot1.YData = lat(1:k); 
     plot1.CData = concentration(1:k); 

     % pause 2/10 second: 
     pause(0.2)
  end

[Chad Greene]

To save the animation as a gif, you can use my gif function.

[foweifnewoi]

Perfect! Just what I needed. Thanks so much Chad.

[Chad Greene]

Great, I'm glad it worked for ya!

[Kritika Nandakumar]

I am new to Matlab. I getting an error Undefined function or variable customMap when i try to execute the above code.

[Chad Greene]

@Kritika: Just set customMap=parula; and that should work fine.

[Pouya]

@Chad Greene Hi Chad do you know how in the answer you provided we can plot every 10000 data points for example and clear the older data points, such that we always have 10000 data points being plotted and replacing the oldest that has been plotted?

[Image Analyst]

@Pouya Pourkarim I think you'd do

if length(lon) < 1000
    % Plot one point.
    plot1 = scatter(lon(1),lat(1),30,concentration(1),'.');
else
    % Plot the last 1000 points.
    delete(plot1); % Clear all prior points.
    plot1 = scatter(lon(end-999:end),lat(end-999:end),30,concentration(end-999:end),'.');
end

[Pouya]

@Image Analyst Thank you, I used

for k = 2:length(lat) 
     plot1.XData = lon(k:k+10000); 
     plot1.YData = lat(k:k+10000); 
     plot1.CData = concentration(1:k); 
     % pause 2/10 second: 
     pause(0.2)
  end

and it worked!

[Joaquín González Borges]

Hi @Pouya @Chad Greene, I would like to make something similar to this graph that you expressed but instead of a map I have three data vectors. Two that define the scatter plot and one for the colormap. I would like to know if a gif can be made where the points appear as the value of the color used to define the color map increases.

I hope you can understand me and help me, thank you very much. I leave you the simple code of the current graph that I have. Thank you so much.

figure
hold on
scatter(vF1_atm_JPTE_ine,Gen_atm_JPTE_ine,sz,GV_F1_F4_JPTE_ine,'flled')
caxis([-0.003 0.015]);
colormap(jet); 
hold off

[Pouya]

Hi @Joaquín González Borges see if this is helpful:

https://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/answers/512627-how-to-map-a-vector-to-a-colourmap