How to Auto-Play Animated Flow Visualization in Latex Presentation

If you’ve ever wanted to include animated graphics, in this case flow visualization from your CFD simulations directly into your LaTex Beamer slides – without opening a separated external player – This post is for you. Here’s a simple and effective way to embed auto-playing animations using animate package.

Step 1: Export Frames

To begin, you’ll need a sequence of image frames from your simulation. I used ParaView to visualize and export a series of PNGs representing each timestep.

pic.0000.png
pic.0001.png
. . .
pic.0020.png

This naming convention allows LateX to auto-load them as a sequence.

Check out my code repo to help with your scientific animations: https://github.com/Dhanushenoy/FluiX

Step 2: Add the Animate Package

In your Latex preamble, add this line to enable animation support:

\usepackage{animate}

The animate package gives you control over frame-rate, looping, and playback behavior – right inside a PDF.

Step 3: Embed the animation into your slide

Once you have the image frames, use the following command:

\begin{figure}[ht]
    \centering 
    \animategraphics[autoplay,loop,width=0.8\textwidth]{8}{Figure/Test/Q8/q8.}{0000}{0019}
    \caption{Angle of attack = \$8^\circ\$}
\end{figure}

Here’s what the arguments mean:

8 -> frames per second
{0000}{0020} -> start and end frame numbers
autoplay,loop -> starts automatically and loops endlessly

That’s it!, when you present this slide in PDF readers like Adobe Acrobat, the animation starts playing as soon as the slide appears.

Step 4: Compile with the Right Engine

This only works if you compile your Latex using pdflatex, not xelatex or lulatex. I recommend compiling with this command if you’re using a terminal:

pdflatex presentation.tex

If you are using Overleaf, make sure to set the compiler to pdflatex under “Project Settings”.

Preview the Animation

Here’s a full looped animation, this is how it will look in your latex presentation.

Thanks for reading — hope this helps you bring your simulations to life on the big screen.

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