I have been making animated 3d plots recently; the last time was perhaps three years ago, and I had some problems then.  If I recall correctly, I couldn't make an animated 3d plot that was plotted in non-Cartesian coordinates.

I am very happy to report that this works very smoothly now in Maple 2022, and it's pretty fast, too.  I have a fairly complex function to plot, involving piecewise polynomials on a tensor product grid in the xi and eta variables (actually, I let plot3d pick out the grid; it seems happier to do so) and then plot them on an elliptical base, in coordinates x = d*cosh(xi)*cos(eta) and y=d*sinh(xi)*sin(eta)  (d is just a numerical constant, giving the location of the foci at (d,0) and (-d,0)), for 0 <= xi <= xi[0] (the outer elliptical boundary) and 0 <= eta <= 2Pi.  The straightforward command works, and building a sequence of plots and using plots[display] works.  I put option remember into my procedure w(xi,eta) and because the sample points are consistent for the time-dependent function exp(I*omega*t)*w(xi,eta) the xi-eta grid needs only to be done once and then one can compute (basically) as many frames as one wants in rapid succession.

Works great.  Thanks, folks!

for k to nplots do
    t := evalf(2*Pi*(k - 1)/nplots);
    plts[k] := plot3d([(xi, eta) -> focus*cosh(xi)*cos(eta), (xi, eta) -> focus*sinh(xi)*sin(eta), (xi, eta) -> Re(exp(omega*t*I)*w(xi, eta))], 0 .. xi[0], 0 .. 2*Pi, colour = ((xi, eta) -> Re(exp(omega*t*I)*w(xi, eta))), style = surfacecontour, lightmodel = "none");
end do;
plots[display](seq(plts[k], k = 1 .. nplots), insequence = true);