abul4fia

How animations work (more or less)

To be frank, I don't know all the details about making your own custom Animation class. I know only a general idea, but the details are fuzzy. I usually end up using a trial-and-error approach trying different methods and reading the source code of similar animations, until it works. But the main idea is:

1. An animation receives a mobject (it can be a group) on which it will operate. In the __init__ method usually it only stores that object into self.mobject, so every animation has that object, and other animation attributes such as the run time, rate function, etc.
2. When used in a .play(), manim will call its begin() method. Usually you don't need to override that. The default implementation creates another inner object called self.starting_mobject which stores the initial state of the mobject being animated, and it is simply a deep copy of self.mobject (although you can override how that starting mobject is created by overriding `create_starting_mobj

abul4fia

Finding shapes in Tex mobjects

This module implements some utility functions to search some shapes (formulas, symbols) inside a Tex (or MathTex) mobject.

The approach is to compare the shapes (bezier curves) of the symbols, instead of the particular strings that produced them. This approach is generic and avoids the use of other manim mechanisms that would break under some circunstances, such as the presence of \frac{}{} in a formula.

The function you would probably want to use is group_shapes_in_tex(). Despite the confusing name, the goal is to find all the occurences of a given symbol (or group of symbols, or list of symbols) inside a Tex mobject, and return a VGroup containing them