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

Manim: Animation engine for explanatory math videos

github.com

124 pointsgilad16 comments

Grant Sanderson (the guy behind 3Blue1Brown on YouTube), and by extension Manim, has done so much for increasing the accessibility of math and computer science.

Like, it’s hard to over-state how enriching it is to have engaging animated visuals if you’re just the average schmuck trying to make it through an engineering undergrad at university.

Seriously: Thanks to Grant, I was able to pick up my Quantum Mechanics textbook again and actually know what the fuck was going on.

Im thinking about the didactic possibilities of interactive animations / graphs... Having math questions / lessons on a tablet including these could make understanding abstract concepts much easier by providing much more sensory input & intuition

Manim, as maintained by Grant Sanderson has many rough edges and he discoirages its use by other people.

There's a more stable downstream known as Manim Community. One can use it, it has somewhat good documentation.

But even this leads to poor code, the API design and architecture decisions are very poor.

I don't like the hodgepodge produced for even the simplest animation.

Can you recommend any alternative?

The community version is https://github.com/ManimCommunity/manim

And there is for Julia: https://github.com/JuliaAnimators/Javis.jl

In Haskell, https://reanimate.github.io/ is very good.

You could also learn Blender. It’s pretty accessible these days and you can easily script it with Python.

p5.js is quite good.

My biggest problem with Manim is the long feedback loop as you (last time i used it) have to render the animation to view it. But it is a really valuable tool.

With p5.js you can get an instant feedback loop and have the animation frame number available with a little effort.

I coded this up and someone shared it here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31311463

I have transitioned to PowerPoint. I create animations and then export a video file.

Thanks, it's a bit unexpected. How good is Power Point for math intensive animations? I am not sure I could easily (or at all) recreate most of the demos from mainm repo, but maybe I am missing something. I will have a look, I am intrigued.

I have made animations with it with enough Math and Deep Learning that were presented both in-company and outside where work done with animations made in PP even won awards.

The Deep Learning papers one sees in NeurIPS, ICML, CVPR, etc. almost all have diagrams made in PP in them.

Using PP has made my life easier.

I even use Google Docs when I do not need animation.

I am a primary Linux user, and I keep at least one machine running Windows because of PP.

Mathologer on YouTube uses PowerPoint (or keynote, don’t remember exactly). He has great math animations. I’m sure it takes a ton of time to make. (It would also take a ton of time to make with manim.)

I have actually done both, and the time taken to do the same task in PowerPoint is much lower. I would say 1/5th or 2/5th.

Also, as I said, the experience of writing code with Manim Community is not good.

If you have experience using prewritten libraries (i.e. you are not an academic or traditional Data Scienctist, and have proper programming experience), you will see that Manim is a bad tool. Not mincing words.

Yes, it takes time. But you get better and spee increases.

Many previous discussions: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=%22manim%22

3 months ago, 25 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30658390

10 months ago, 67 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28245277

1 year ago, 75 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26498527

2 years ago, 19 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24926947

3 years ago, 80 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19716019

The examples page, for the curious: https://3b1b.github.io/manim/getting_started/example_scenes....

My sincere hope is that Grant &/or 3B1B community port all the many amazing visualizations done with Manim into interactive WebXR with ThreeJS or BabylonJS or raw WebGPU. The best fit for these data stories is AR/VR -- being immersed in 3D just works!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com