Live Script: Multiple Figures Merge into a Single Animation

When running a Live Script that plots several figures inside a loop, I expect MATLAB to produce separate animations, one per figure.

However, all plots are combined into a single inline animation — the frames from different figures appear alternately, making the animation look like a “blinking” mix of results.

Here’s a simplified version of my code:

a = linspace(0, pi ,100);

for ii = 1:100
    figure(1); hold on; box on
    plot(gca, a(ii), sin(a(ii)), 'r*')
    xlim([0 pi]); ylim([-1 1]);
    drawnow
    
    figure(2); hold on; box on
    plot(gca, a(ii), cos(a(ii)), 'r*')
    xlim([0 pi]); ylim([-1 1]);
    drawnow
end

In the Live Editor, instead of getting two separate animations (one for figure(1) and one for figure(2)), the frames from both are merged into one.

Any guidance or best practices for managing multiple animated figures in Live Scripts would be appreciated.

Answer 1

[Dyuman Joshi]

Here's an approach with animatedline and subplot -

%Data
N = 500;
x = linspace(0, pi, N);
y1 = sin(x);
y2 = cos(x);

%Generate subplot
sub = subplot(2,1,1);
axis([0,2*pi,-1,1])
h1=animatedline('Color','r');
subplot(2,1,2)
axis([0,2*pi,-1,1])
h2=animatedline('Color','k');

%Plot lines point by point
for k=1:N
    addpoints(h1,x(k),y1(k));
    addpoints(h2,x(k),y2(k));
    drawnow
end

[Dyuman Joshi]

Any updates, @Yongzhen Mi?