Manim: Animation engine for explanatory math videos (github.com)

Wanted to look for this a while back. Thank you for sharing the link.

This is cool. I immediately clicked because I thought of this awesome video from a couple years ago, Animation vs Math:

https://youtu.be/B1J6Ou4q8vE

I like math but showing someone a giant graph isn’t always the best approach. :)

I have been using this with cursor to make videos to explain papers and math concepts to myself.

Some of the results are not perfect (AI sometimes misaligns some shapes), but it's quite helpful and with a couple of iterations you get to a really good explainer video.

This gets submitted quite regularly to HN with many good discussions- so instead of posting the discussions I'll just link the search.

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=manim

See also :

https://github.com/ManimCommunity/manim

It seems like the community fork would be the better link for most people.

https://github.com/ManimCommunity/manim/

Grant's work with 3blue1brown and Manim is simply amazing. The quality of the videos is so high, not the least thanks to the visualizations. Not an easy task given the abstract nature of the topic.

It's linked in the readme, but I want to highlight the demo video [0], where Grant explains how he works with Manim.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbu7Zu5X1zI

another youtuber-math-video-library: https://github.com/2swap/swaptube

from what i can tell they render their whole videos start to finish using it?

3b1b is truly a wonder of the internet world. Such beautiful animations, such well thought out explanations.

What I don't quite understand is how one library can animate so many different concepts. To me they seem like they'd all be a custom job, but I guess he works on a higher plane of mathematical existence.

Can in it do interactive 3d diagrams.

As we are in HN:

https://github.com/vydd/sketch

Math animaton package for Common Lisp.

I used Manim for one of my class presentations, absolutely a delight to use and as expected many people recognized the style and overall the presentation was well received. Incredibly, I had the opportunity to meet Grant as well a few years back. I told him I have used Manim and he was genuinely excited. Such a cool person with so much contribution to human knowledge and understanding.

Fwiw this absolutely works amazingly well with modern coding assistants. “I want a diagram of equation X morphing into Y” or similar is always a one shot success for me.

Part of it is the simplistic syntax and the sheer amount of open source manim examples to train on but it’s a pretty great demonstration of ai coding agents time saving. Especially since the output video looking correct is all you care about here. Ie. I don’t actually care about the specifics of how my explanatory videos were created, just that they were created via a simple prompt and it gave me what i wanted.

Is there a typescript alternative?

Related:

Show HN: Python library to add voiceovers to Manim videos programmatically - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35961318 - May 2023 (6 comments)

Manim: Animation engine for explanatory math videos - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31636657 - June 2022 (16 comments)

Manim – Python library for creating mathematical animations - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30658390 - March 2022 (25 comments)

Manim: An animation engine for explanatory math videos - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28245277 - Aug 2021 (67 comments)

Manim – an animation engine for explanatory math videos - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26498527 - March 2021 (75 comments)

Show HN: I made a parser visualizer using manim - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26382729 - March 2021 (15 comments)

A Manim Code Template - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24985609 - Nov 2020 (1 comment)

Manim: Animation engine for explanatory math videos - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24926947 - Oct 2020 (19 comments)

Manim – 3Blue1Brown's animation engine for explanatory math videos - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19716019 - April 2019 (80 comments)

I'd love to see this for English grammar

I'm searching badly for a similar tool (code-based animation renderer) but not focused on math, but rather on general-purpose infographic/charts/motion graphics. The traditional approach for that, of course, is to use After Effects/Davinci Fusion/Blender/Cavalry/etc., but since I've first tried PovRay back in the early 2000s and then tools like Manim, I can't stop thinking about a code/text-based motion graphics tool. It would shine in use with LLMs, of course, and while I see some new "ChatGPT-wrappers for Motion Graphics" pop up now and then, I don't need yet another chat to send me cloud-rendered videos in the Electron app. I want a templated code/language for the graphics and style I'll settle on to use with different data and be able to render it locally (or event automate) as much as I want.

When I tried to use it about 4 years ago it definitely suffered from kwargs-itus. Everything is kwargs. No type annotations (it wasn't even possible to write type annotations for kwargs at the time). Definitely made it unnecessarily difficult to use.

I did make an attempt at fixing that but it got zero traction. I wonder if they've made any progress.