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Software worth exploring - Manim

When I started this blog, I wanted my blog-posts to be about ideas and experiences. The motive was to write content that never sinks and is somehow able to float through time. This is why I usually shy away from writing blog-posts about frameworks, libraries, or even languages and why I am paranoid about archiving thought-provoking web-pages. However, when I stumbled upon Manim (Mathematical Animation Engine) and explored it for a while, I knew this warranted a blog-post.

Although Grant Sanderson (the author of Manim) likes to call it an animation engine, after playing around for a while, I found it akin to an imagination engine. The ability to craft beautiful animations and text so effortlessly has amazed me the most. Here is a video I made using Manim:

An introduction on Coreference Resolution (the topic of our bachelor thesis)

From what I have observed, Manim renders each animation separately and then combines it to produce the entire video. As I have not explored much of the mathematical side of Manim, I will primarily share links for the text-rendering part.

Links

If some of the Github links are missing, I suggest going to commit aff2d21.

• Introduction: Though not comprehensive, it is an excellent place to start learning Manim. (archive)
• Animations: Comprehensive list of all the animations - Creation, Indication, and Transformation.
• Creation: For creating and destroying objects (with various animations).
• Indication: For focussing on a particular object.
• Transformation: Contains transforming an object to new objects, transforming objects to new locations, styling objects, etc.
• Constants: Up-to-date info on location constants (like UP, DOWN, LEFT_SIDE, etc), video resolution constants (high, med, low), pre-built color maps, etc.
• Movements and Rotations: For rotating, squishing, and moving objects.
• Official documentation: Contains many more examples.

If you want some amazing code examples, I highly suggest you skim the repositories for_3b1b_videos and from_3b1b. It contains the code Grant Sanderson has used for his youtube channel 3blue1brown. For example, when I wanted to underline a text, I found the relevant code in common_scenes.py.

That's it for now!

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