Drawing your own shape in the Canvas studio
Draw a freehand shape, edit its points, and animate it point by point.
So far you've been placing shapes from the Object Library. This tutorial covers the other way to get a shape into Manim Studio: drawing one by hand in the Canvas studio, then animating every point of it at once.
The Canvas studio is a separate workspace from the main scene editor — anything you draw here is tagged to its own space and never appears in your regular scene, and vice versa. Think of it as a second, independent project living alongside your main one. See Editor vs. Canvas for the full reasoning if you're curious why they're split.
1. Switch to the Canvas workspace
In the top toolbar, find the Editor / Canvas switch and click Canvas. The whole layout changes: a new left sidebar with drawing tools, shape stamps, and text/symbol inserts, plus a right panel dedicated to style, points, transform, 3D, and point-animation controls. Entering this workspace arms the pen tool automatically, since drawing is what it's for.
2. Draw a freehand squiggle
Click the pencil icon in the Tools row (the one that looks like a pencil, next to the pen). Now draw directly on the canvas — click and drag to sketch any loose, wavy line.
When you release, your freehand stroke is automatically converted into a smooth, editable path — you don't end up with a raw pixel trace, you get a proper vector shape with anchor points and handles that you can reshape afterward.
3. Switch to point editing
Press V (or click the cursor icon in the Tools row) to switch to the point-editing tool. Your squiggle now shows its anchor points as small squares.
Click and drag a couple of the anchors to reshape the path. Notice the curve updates live as you drag.
A few more moves worth knowing:
- Double-click an anchor to toggle it between a smooth (curved) point and a sharp corner.
- Alt+click a point to delete it.
- Double-click the curve itself (not on a point) to insert a new anchor right there.
4. Animate every point at once
With your path selected, scroll down the right panel to Point animations. This is the section that makes freehand drawings genuinely fun to work with: instead of keyframing each anchor individually, one click staggers an animation across every point in the path.
Try Wave — each point bobs up and back, staggered along the path, like a ripple running through your drawing. Or try Assemble, which flies every point in from the shape's center so the whole drawing builds itself on screen.
Click one of the preset buttons. It adds a set of staggered per-point animations starting at the current playhead, using the Dur/Lag/Amp values above the buttons to control how long each point animates, how much delay separates consecutive points, and how far they travel.
Want manual control instead of a preset? Turn on ● record in the timeline, move the playhead, and drag a single anchor point on the canvas — that point gets its own individual animation, the same record-mode workflow you'd use on any other object.
5. Preview it
Press Space to play. Watch your hand-drawn shape animate point by point.
Where to go from here
Two natural next steps once freehand drawing feels comfortable:
- Import an SVG instead of drawing from scratch — vector files come in as fully editable, keyframable paths just like a pencil stroke. See Import an SVG.
- Give your drawing depth — the right panel's 3D section (Z depth, RX/RY rotation) turns a flat path into something with real spatial presence, and keyframing RY spins it in space. See Work in 3D.
That's the last of the tutorials. From here, the how-to guides cover specific tasks in both workspaces — now that you know the basics, that's the place to look up exactly how to do any one thing.