Manim: Animation engine for explanatory math videos | Hacker News Reader

Manim: Animation engine for explanatory math videos

github.com

283 pointsdoppp19 comments

For those interested in Manim, there's an actively developed fork called ManimCommunity[0] that is looking to make it even more powerful and developer friendly.

https://github.com/ManimCommunity/manim

If you like this, also check out the Haskell reanimate[1] library. It's a library for animated diagrams inspired by Manim but with a different API design and feature set.

Here's a snippet to trace out a rotating rectangle:

    do s <- fork $ newSpriteA drawBox
       v <- spriteVar s 0 rotate
       tweenVar v 2 $ \val -> fromToS val 90

The API docs[2] have a bunch of small examples like this illustrated with inline gifs, which I think is a great touch.

[1]: https://github.com/reanimate/reanimate

[2]: https://hackage.haskell.org/package/reanimate-1.1.2.1/docs/R...

Thank you for the library tip!

It’s too bad the gifs seem to be just file references instead of real-time animations. Looks like some of the code snippets do not match their animations.

For example, parLoopA and parDropA seem to have the same sample code, but have different animations.

Good catch. Fixed in HEAD.

One thing I don’t think a lot of people appreciate is that Manim is the spiritual successor to Bentley and Kernighan’s Anim, an early system for algorithm visualization: https://static.usenix.org/publications/compsystems/1991/win_...

Great timing! I've been looking for something like this to generate code walkthroughs (among other things).

After a bit of playing around, here is a simple video (with linked source) of using Manim (the community edition) to generate a quick walkthrough:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i-pvpQsZD_I

Most of this could also be created via an editor like DaVinci Resolve, but the programmer in me likes the consistency and flexibility of a code-driven video.

Nice! Is there a steep learning curve with Manim? How long did it take to create that video?

Sadly, it took me a few hours, but only because I went down a rabbit hole of trying to render a colorized code snippet without knowing the Code class existed. I got to the point of a custom Tex template that used listings, only to find out Manim strips any color, so I attempted to parse the SVG and reinsert color using Manim APIs... only to find out Code did everything I wanted and more :)

Once I found out about Code, I'd say probably 15 minutes to land on the opacity strategy and a few minutes to learn how to control the camera, so in the end, not bad. The limiting factor is now figuring out what I want it to do in the first place.

Cool demo. I tried using manim a while ago but struggled setting it up and creating anything worthwhile. This looks like a solid and simple starting point to expand from, thanks!

If you haven't heard of 3 Blue 1 Brown, congrats[0] because you are in for a treat. He is simply one of the best intuitive math video creators in the game right now. I can't even a good intro, just find something interesting or something you're confused about and enjoy[1]

[0]: https://xkcd.com/1053/ [1]: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYO_jab_esuFRV4b17AJtAw

BTW, he's currently co-teaching a course on Julia with some really great lectures on computational thinking:

https://computationalthinking.mit.edu/Fall20/

He also had a nice video about epidemics/pandemics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxAaO2rsdIs

All using manim for visualizations.

If interested in animation and Julia you might wanna have a look at: https://github.com/Wikunia/Javis.jl We are currently working on v0.3 with a cleaner syntax. Coming in about a week

I just started watching the intro to linear algebra course this morning, so this is quite the coincidence! I'm really appreciating how visual the explanations are, I find it much easier to reason about these things geometrically.

Grant Sanderson, the creator of Manim, talked about Manim on the Lex Fridman podcast[0]. He emphasized that he is no software engineer and did not plan on making Manim publicly available when he started.

[0] https://lexfridman.com/grant-sanderson-2/

Thanks for the reference! Here's the video version of the podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_6AYX42gkU

Can it do stuff in 3d, like vectors in space and geometry of solids? At a first glance it is not clear if it can or cannot.

Also is there a comparable tools that do such interactive math animation in 3d.

I think it can: https://docs.manim.community/en/latest/examples/3d.html

Rich Text Effects in Godot 3.2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ep3tsI-MWIw

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