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Getting Started

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Tagin T edited this page Sep 4, 2026 · 2 revisions

Getting Started

Audience: users who want to use real-time-manim to render and record scenes. For internals see Architecture and Internals.

Requirements

  • Windows 10/11 (64-bit)
  • Python 3.11+
  • A Vulkan-capable GPU and current graphics driver
  • ffmpeg on your PATH (only needed for recording)

Install

The package is published on PyPI:

pip install real-time-manim

The wheel bundles vulkan_core.dll and the window icon, so no build step is needed to render. (Building from source is covered in Building the DLL.)

Your first window

Open a real-time window and draw a square:

from manim import Scene, Square, BLUE
from real_time_manim.vulkan_bind import MLWindow, Create, Wait

class Hello(Scene):
    def construct(self):
        win = MLWindow(960, 540)          # opens a live Vulkan window
        win.scene = self                  # bind the scene
        sq = Square(side_length=1.5, color=BLUE).set_fill(BLUE, 0.6)
        win.play(Create(sq), run_time=1.0)
        win.play(Wait(0.5))
        win.close()

Hello().construct()

Run it and a window titled Real Time Manim appears and animates the square.

Record to MP4 in one call

Recording is wrapped so you never touch low-level hooks:

from real_time_manim.record import fast_record_scene, record_scene

fast_record_scene(Hello)                     # offline → ~/Downloads/output.mp4
fast_record_scene(Hello, "clip.mp4")         # custom path
record_scene(Hello, "live.mp4", fps=30)      # record against a live window
  • fast_record_scene is offline: it hides the window, reads frames straight from the Vulkan framebuffer and pipes them to ffmpeg. Fast, no flashing window.
  • record_scene captures a visible live window in a background thread.

Both return a dict with the produced paths, and both clean up the transient media/ folder automatically afterwards. See Recording and the API Reference for every option.

The whole workflow with LaTeX scenes

When your scene contains Tex/MathTex, warm and re-store the LaTeX cache so formulas are compiled once and reused:

from real_time_manim.util import restore_tex_cache, save_tex_cache
from real_time_manim.record import fast_record_scene

restore_tex_cache("tex_cache")               # warm manim's SVG dir
fast_record_scene(MyLatexScene, "eq.mp4")    # record + auto media cleanup
save_tex_cache("tex_cache")                  # stash any newly compiled SVGs

See Math Rendering and the util docs in the API Reference.

Next steps

The published package is core-only. To try the engine quickly, model scenes on the Getting-Started examples above, browse the supported animations in the API Reference, and read Recording and Math Rendering for the specifics.

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