OpenFOAM Tutorial | How to create an Animation

An animation communicates what a set of contour plots cannot: how the flow develops. For a transient case it is often the only honest way to show whether a vortex sheds, a front advances or a solution simply never settles.

The material comes from the solver itself. OpenFOAM writes one time directory per saved step, ParaView reads that sequence as a series of frames, and what you set up once (the field to display, the colour range, the camera position) is applied to every frame automatically.

Two details make the difference between a smooth clip and a jerky one. The write interval has to be regular and frequent enough for the motion you want to show, and the colour scale must be fixed across the whole sequence, because a range that rescales on each frame makes a steady flow look like it is pulsing.