JMathAnim

A Java library to make mathematical animations (homepage)

Introduction

JMathAnim is a library written in JAVA intended to simplify the process of doing mathematical animations. Initially inspired by the python manim library from 3Blue1Brown.

Prerrequisites

A machine with JDK installed

Basic Example

We will show a very basic example to illustrate the structure of an animation:

public class myFirstScene extends Scene2D {
    
    @Override
    public void setupSketch() {
    }
    
    @Override
    public void runSketch() throws Exception {
        Shape s = Shape.square();
        play.showCreation(s);
	play.rotate(30*DEGREES,s);
        waitSeconds(5);
    }
	
	public static void main(String[] args) {
        JMathAnimScene scene = new myScene();
        scene.execute();
    }
}

If you run this program, a window will open showing an animation where a white square is drawed, then rotated, and a few seconds (maybe 5 or more), the windows is closed. The core of animation lies in the myFirstScene class, which is an extension of Scene2D class. This class has two methods, setupSketch, which manages the basic configuration of the animation, like fps, size, output, etc. and runSketch, which performs the animation itself. In this example, the setupSketch method is empty, so the default configuration is loaded. In the runSketch method we have the first command:

Shape s = Shape.square();

This command creates a Shape object which represents a 2D figure, closed or not. This class has several static, convenience methods to easily create most common shapes. With the method square, we create an unit square with lower left corner at (0,0). Note that defining this doesn't add the square to the scene, so for now it won't be drawed. The following method performs most of what is shown when running the program:

play.showCreation(s);

This method plays an animation showing the square being created, with a default duration of 2 seconds. After the animation ends, the square is added to the scene. The following command works in a similar way, except in this case it animates a rotation of the square, rotating it 30 degrees clockwise.

play.rotate(30*DEGREES,s);

The waitSeconds method simply waits for the specified amount of seconds, adding this frozen frames to the final output:

waitSeconds(5);

If you are satisfied with the result and want to create a movie, you may add the following command in the setupSketchmethod:

    @Override
    public void setupSketch() {
    	config.setCreateMovie(true);
    }

By default, it will create a movie into a subfolder of the project called media, with the name <name_of_my_class>_widthInPX.mp4.

Limitations

Right now, the library is still in development, so there may be bugs and missing features.

Dependencies

This library uses the following 3rd party libraries:

• JavaFX For the graphics part.
• Xuggler For creating videos.
• JLaTeXMath For creating the LaTeX texts and mathematical expressions.
• Logback Project For logging purposes.

License

This project is licensed under the GNU v3 license (https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html)