Manim is an animation engine for explanatory math videos. It's used to create precise animations programmatically, as seen in the videos at [3Blue1Brown](https://www.3blue1brown.com/).
System requirements are [cairo](https://www.cairographics.org), [ffmpeg](https://www.ffmpeg.org), [sox](http://sox.sourceforge.net), [latex](https://www.latex-project.org) (optional, if you want to use LaTeX).
You can now use it via the `manim` command. For example:
2. Install Cairo. Download the wheel from https://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/#pycairo. For most users, ``pycairo‑1.18.0‑cp37‑cp37m‑win32.whl`` will do fine.
Since it's a bit tricky to get all the dependencies set up just right, there is a Dockerfile and Compose file provided in this repo as well as [a premade image on Docker Hub](https://hub.docker.com/r/eulertour/manim/tags/). The Dockerfile contains instructions on how to build a manim image, while the Compose file contains instructions on how to run the image.
The image does not contain a copy of the repo. This is intentional, as it allows you to either bind mount a repo that you've cloned locally or clone any fork/branch you want. In order to do this with the Compose file, you must set the `MANIM_PATH` environment variable to the absolute path to the manim repo.
The first time you execute the above command, Docker will pull the image from Docker Hub and cache it. Any subsequent runs until the image is evicted will use the cached image.
The `-p` flag in the command above is for previewing, meaning the video file will automatically open when it is done rendering. The `-l` flag is for a faster rendering at a lower quality.
*`-s` to skip to the end and just show the final frame.
*`-n <number>` to skip ahead to the `n`'th animation of a scene.
*`-f` to show the file in finder (for OSX).
Set `MEDIA_DIR` environment variable to specify where the image and animation files will be written.
Look through the `old_projects` folder to see the code for previous 3b1b videos. Note, however, that developments are often made to the library without considering backwards compatibility with those old projects. To run an old project with a guarantee that it will work, you will have to go back to the commit which completed that project.
While developing a scene, the `-sp` flags are helpful to just see what things look like at the end without having to generate the full animation. It can also be helpful to use the `-n` flag to skip over some number of animations.
Todd Zimmerman put together a [tutorial](https://talkingphysics.wordpress.com/2019/01/08/getting-started-animating-with-manim-and-python-3-7/) on getting started with manim, which has been updated to run on python 3.7.
