Your first scene
Place a shape, animate it, and watch it play — the smallest possible loop.
In this tutorial you'll place a shape, give it an entrance animation, and watch it play — the smallest possible round trip through Manim Studio. It takes about five minutes.
1. Open the editor
Go to /editor. You'll land on a blank project: an empty canvas in the middle, the Object Library on the left, the Inspector on the right, and the timeline along the bottom.
2. Add a circle
In the Object Library on the left, find the Shapes section and click Circle.
Clicking an item in the library drops it at the origin of the scene, already selected. If you'd rather choose exactly where it lands, double-click the library entry instead — that arms the placement tool, and your next click on the canvas places the circle there.
You can also drag a shape straight from the library and drop it wherever you want on the canvas — same result as double-click-then-click, in one motion.
3. Look at the Inspector
With the circle selected, the right-hand panel switches to the Inspector, and a row of tabs appears near the top: Style, Shape, Move, Anim, and a couple of others depending on the object type.
- Style — fill, stroke, opacity, colors
- Shape — geometry features specific to a circle (radius, radius lines, center point…)
- Move — position, rotation, scale
- Anim — animation events for this object
Each tab edits a different facet of the same object; nothing here is destructive, so feel free to click through them before moving on.
4. Give it an entrance
Click the Anim tab. At the very top sits the Animate a value panel, for sending a single number from one value to another — we'll come back to that at the end. Below it is a collapsible ❓ How do keyframes work? card, and below that, under the label Quick animate at playhead, the grid you want: preset cards like FadeIn, Create, GrowFromCenter, plus a few exits and emphasis effects. Each card plays its own little demo animation on a loop, so you can see what a preset does at a glance; hovering one brings up a floating card with its name and a short hint.
Click FadeIn (or Create, if you'd rather watch the circle draw itself on).
That click stamps a clip onto the timeline at the current position of the playhead — by default, at 0 seconds, since you haven't moved it yet.
5. Look at the timeline
Glance down at the timeline panel. You should now see a track for your circle with a short colored clip sitting at its start — teal-green for an entrance, by convention (exits are red, one-shot emphasis is amber, and so on — the legend along the transport bar spells out the rest).
Each object gets its own track, and every animation you add to that object shows up as a clip on it. Drag a clip to retime it, drag its edges to change its duration, or right-click it for more options — none of that is required right now, just good to know it's there.
6. Play it
Press Space to play. The playhead sweeps across the timeline and your circle fades (or draws) into existence. Press Space again to stop.
That's the whole loop: place an object, pick an animation, watch it play.
One-click presets are great for entrances, exits, and emphasis, but they can't express "this value goes from A to B" — that's what the Animate a value panel at the top of the same Anim tab is for. Pick a property under "What", type a "To" value and a duration, click the button, and a finished animation appears on the timeline. It handles single-number properties like opacity, rotation, radius, width, height and stroke width; for position, scale, colour and everything else over time, see Keyframe any property.
What's next
Now that something is moving on screen, the natural next step is turning it into an actual video file — head to Render your first video.