manim

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Manim is an engine for precise programmatic animations, designed for creating explanatory math videos.

Note, there are two versions of manim. This repository began as a personal project by the author of 3Blue1Brown for the purpose of animating those videos, with video-specific code available here. In 2020 a group of developers forked it into what is now the community edition, with a goal of being more stable, better tested, quicker to respond to community contributions, and all around friendlier to get started with. See this page for more details.

Installation

[!Warning] WARNING: These instructions are for ManimGL only. Trying to use these instructions to install Manim Community/manim or instructions there to install this version will cause problems. You should first decide which version you wish to install, then only follow the instructions for your desired version.

[!Note] Note: To install manim directly through pip, please pay attention to the name of the installed package. This repository is ManimGL of 3b1b. The package name is manimgl instead of manim or manimlib. Please use pip install manimgl to install the version in this repository.

Manim runs on Python 3.10 or higher.

System requirements are FFmpeg, OpenGL and LaTeX (optional, if you want to use LaTeX). For Linux, Pango along with its development headers are required. See instruction here.

Directly

# Install manimgl
pip install manimgl

# Try it out
manimgl

For more options, take a look at the Using manim sections further below.

If you want to hack on manimlib itself, clone this repository and in that directory execute:

# Install manimgl
pip install -e .

# Try it out
manimgl example_scenes.py OpeningManimExample
# or
manim-render example_scenes.py OpeningManimExample

Linux (Ubuntu/Debian)

1. Install system dependencies.

sudo apt update

sudo apt install ffmpeg
sudo apt install python3-pip
sudo apt install libpango1.0-dev

2. Install a lightweight LaTeX distribution (optional, for LaTeX rendering).

sudo apt install texlive-science texlive-fonts-extra texlive-latex-extra

This lightweight setup is significantly smaller than installing texlive-full while still supporting most Manim projects.

3. Clone and install ManimGL.

git clone https://github.com/3b1b/manim.git
cd manim

python3 -m pip install -e .

manimgl example_scenes.py OpeningManimExample

It is recommended to use a virtual environment to avoid conflicts with system packages.

sudo apt install python3-venv

python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate

python3 -m pip install -e .

If python3-venv is unavailable on your system, try installing the version-specific package instead:

sudo apt install python3.12-venv

Directly (Windows)

1. Install FFmpeg.
2. Install a LaTeX distribution. MiKTeX is recommended.
3. Install the remaining Python packages.

   git clone https://github.com/3b1b/manim.git
   cd manim
   pip install -e .
   manimgl example_scenes.py OpeningManimExample
   

Mac OSX

1. Install FFmpeg, LaTeX in terminal using homebrew.

   brew install ffmpeg mactex
   

   To avoid installing the full MacTeX bundle, which is ~6GB, you can alternatively install the lightweight BasicTeX and then gradually add only the LaTeX packages you actually need. A list of packages sufficient to run examples can be found here. For an overview of the MacTeX installer bundles, see https://www.tug.org/mactex/.

2. If you are using an ARM-based processor, install Cairo.

   arch -arm64 brew install pkg-config cairo
   

3. Install latest version of manim using these command.

   git clone https://github.com/3b1b/manim.git
   cd manim
   pip install -e .
   manimgl example_scenes.py OpeningManimExample
   

   If the last command is not found, make sure the directory pip installed manimgl into is on your PATH.

Anaconda Install

1. Install LaTeX as above.
2. Create a conda environment using conda create -n manim python=3.10.
3. Activate the environment using conda activate manim.
4. Install manimgl using pip install -e ..

Using manim

Try running the following:

manimgl example_scenes.py OpeningManimExample

This should pop up a window playing a simple scene.

Look through the example scenes to see examples of the library's syntax, animation types and object types. In the 3b1b/videos repo, you can see all the code for 3blue1brown videos, though code from older videos may not be compatible with the most recent version of manim. The readme of that repo also outlines some details for how to set up a more interactive workflow, as shown in this manim demo video for example.

When running in the CLI, some useful flags include:

• -w to write the scene to a file
• -o to write the scene to a file and open the result
• -s to skip to the end and just show the final frame.
  • -so will save the final frame to an image and show it
• -n <number> to skip ahead to the n'th animation of a scene.
• -f to make the playback window fullscreen

Take a look at custom_config.yml for further configuration. To add your customization, you can either edit this file, or add another file by the same name "custom_config.yml" to whatever directory you are running manim from. For example this is the one for 3blue1brown videos. There you can specify where videos should be output to, where manim should look for image files and sounds you want to read in, and other defaults regarding style and video quality.

Documentation

Documentation is in progress at 3b1b.github.io/manim. And there is also a Chinese version maintained by @manim-kindergarten: docs.manim.org.cn (in Chinese).

manim-kindergarten wrote and collected some useful extra classes and some codes of videos in manim_sandbox repo.

Contributing

Is always welcome. As mentioned above, the community edition has the most active ecosystem for contributions, with testing and continuous integration, but pull requests are welcome here too. Please explain the motivation for a given change and examples of its effect.

License

This project falls under the MIT license.