Manim Examples

Table of Contents

• Installation
  • Linux Installation
  • Windows Installation
• Creating your first Scene
• Displaying text
• Math equations
• Creating graphs

Installation

For installing Manim on your system I recommend following the Installation guide from the Manim documentation.

Creating your first Scene

Now that you have installed everything correctly you're ready to write your first application.

from manim import *

class SquareToCircle(Scene):
    def construct(self):
        # Creating shapes
        circle = Circle()
        square = Square()

        #Showing shapes
        self.play(Create(square))
        self.play(Transform(square, circle))
        self.play(FadeOut(square))

manim square_to_circle.py SquareToCircle -p -ql

Lets break this down step-by-step:

• The import statement on top imports everything needed to use Manim.
• For running animations, you have to create a class that inherits from Manims Scene class.
• Inside the class you need to create the construct method. The construct method is essentially the main method for the class. In it you can write all the code for the animation.
• Inside the construct method I first created two MObjects (Manim Objects) – a circle and a square. Lastly I displayed the shapes using the play method.

We can also modify the appearance of the objects by adding a few lines of code:

from manim import *

class SquareToCircleWithModifications(Scene):
    def construct(self):
        circle = Circle()
        square = Square()
        square.flip(RIGHT)
        square.rotate(-3 * TAU / 8)
        circle.set_fill(PINK, opacity=0.5)

        self.play(Create(square))
        self.play(Transform(square, circle))
        self.play(FadeOut(square))

Displaying text

Displaying text is also pretty straight forward.

from manim import *


class displayText(Scene):
    def construct(self):
        # Create Text objects
        first_line = Text('Create cool animations')
        second_line = Text('using Manim')
        third_line = Text('Try it out yourself.', color=RED)

        # Position second line underneath first line
        second_line.next_to(first_line, DOWN)

        # Displaying text
        self.wait(1)
        self.play(Write(first_line), Write(second_line))
        self.wait(1)
        self.play(ReplacementTransform(first_line, third_line), FadeOut(second_line))
        self.wait(2)

In order to display text you need to create a Text object and pass it the text you want to write to the screen. After that you can display the text using the play method and some animation.

Math equations

Math equations can be written in Manim using LaTeX – a typesetting system widely used in academia. On of LaTeX big advantages is that it allows you to create good looking math equation with an intuitive system.

I won't go over LaTeX in this article but if you are curious there are lots of great tutorials out there.

For equations instead of using a Text object you need to use a Tex object. When making an equation you need to put a $ at the start and end of the text.

text = Text('some text')
equation = Tex('$some equation$')

You can add symbols like the summation or integral symbols with two backslashes.

alpha = Tex('$\\alpha$')

Displaying some text and an equation could look like the following:

from manim import *


class displayEquations(Scene):
    def construct(self):
        # Create Tex objects
        first_line = Text('Manim also allows you')
        second_line = Text('to show beautiful math equations')
        equation = Tex('$d\\left(p, q\\right)=d\\left(q, p\\right)=\\sqrt{(q_1-p_1)^2+(q_2-p_2)^2+...+(q_n-p_n)^2}=\\sqrt{\\sum_{i=1}^n\\left(q_i-p_i\\right)^2}$')
        
        # Position second line underneath first line
        second_line.next_to(first_line, DOWN)

        # Displaying text and equation
        self.play(Write(first_line), Write(second_line))
        self.wait(1)
        self.play(ReplacementTransform(first_line, equation), FadeOut(second_line))
        self.wait(3)

Creating graphs

Manim also allows us to create and display graphs.

from manim import *


class CreateGraph(Scene):
    def construct(self):
        axes = Axes(
            x_range=[-3, 3],
            y_range=[-5, 5],
            axis_config={"color": BLUE},
        )

        # Create Graph
        graph = axes.get_graph(lambda x: x**2, color=WHITE)
        graph_label = axes.get_graph_label(graph, label='x^{2}')

        graph2 = axes.get_graph(lambda x: x**3, color=WHITE)
        graph_label2 = axes.get_graph_label(graph2, label='x^{3}')

        # Display graph
        self.play(Create(axes), Create(graph), Write(graph_label))
        self.wait(1)
        self.play(Transform(graph, graph2), Transform(graph_label, graph_label2))
        self.wait(1)

As you can see to create a graph you need to create a method that returns a y value for every x value it gets. In the code above I used lambda functions to specify them but you can also use any other method. After you have created the method you need to pass it to axes.get_graph, which creates a mobject out of the method.

Note that the method only specifies how the graph should look like and doesn't actually calculate any values yet.

Author

Gilbert Tanner