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https://yt-project.org/ -- yt for python was used by a few of my old colleagues for visualizing astrophysical simulations. There is yet another program that I've since forgotten but will try to come back here and comment if I remember.

If you can generate a single static figure, you can manually generate animations by generating each frame separately using your favorite plotting software. You can then stitch them together using many different tools (I use matplotlib) to generate an animation (video, gif, etc.).

What language do you like to use? What's your background -- are you a Matlab person?

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I work on yt, and I just wanted to comment to say that whenever I stumble on a mention of it somewhere, I genuinely feel warm inside. Thank you for thinking of us!

One of the things we've tried to do -- especially by leveraging the technology and innovations in the tools we build on (especially matplotlib!) -- is to make it easier to make visualizations and plots that are "by-default" communicative and information-rich.

And, of course we have lots of room for improvement, for picking up and encouraging "best practices" at the library level, but it has been really enjoyable and illuminating to have the opportunity to explore that with the community.

Thanks for all the work on yt.

Did you consider replacing the rainbow color map images on your front page?

Yup, and we don't use a rainbow colormap by default anymore! We do provide a few custom ones that were developed with viscm, which I believe was used by in development of viridis, magma, etc. I think the specific examples are all from the published literature, and we accepted them as submitted by users -- but a refresh would be good!

I opened an issue: https://github.com/yt-project/website/issues/70

My suspicion is that you are thinking of the tool VisIt ( https://wci.llnl.gov/simulation/computer-codes/visit/ ). VisIt vs yt has some tradeoffs, but by and large it is very useful for rapidly visualizing numerical simulations and supports a large variety of them. I use it daily.

Thank you!!! Yes! VisIt is what I was trying to remember. I don’t know VisIt, only that it exists and numerical people (at least in Astro) use it.

I am a Matlab person, among other tools as well. I do something of the sort that you suggested in your second paragraph to plot time-varying diagrams by generating successive frames and then making a gif.

Matlab can also do some very nice colormap stuff. Just wish there was a method with less friction!

If you use a video format, viewers can scan in a controlled way.

Edit: OK, there's also gifview.

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