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Camera Control & Viewport Framing

Animora provides a camera convenience wrapper (animora.core.Camera) built on top of Manim's MovingCameraScene. It offers semantic viewport manipulation with automated bounding-box calculation, smooth multi-object framing, target tracking, and reset transitions.

1. Quick Start

To enable dynamic camera movements in your animations, subclass MovingCameraScene and instantiate Camera(self):

from animora.core import MovingCameraScene, Camera
from animora.datastructures import Array
from animora.theme import ModernDark, use_theme


class CameraDemoScene(MovingCameraScene):
    def construct(self) -> None:
        with use_theme(ModernDark):
            arr = Array([10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80])
            self.play(arr.animate_create())

            cam = Camera(self)

            # 1. Focus onto a specific subarray or element
            cam.focus(arr, scale=0.7, run_time=1.5)

            # 2. Reset back to the default wide viewport
            cam.reset(run_time=1.2)

2. Core Camera Operations

camera.focus(target, scale=1.0, run_time=1.0, rate_func=...)

Smoothly animates the camera frame to center on target (either an Animora Component or a Manim Mobject). - target: The element to center the viewport on. - scale: Zoom multiplier. Values $< 1.0$ zoom in closer; values $> 1.0$ zoom out.

# Zoom in tightly on the 4th array element
target_box = arr.get_cell(3)
cam.focus(target_box, scale=0.5, run_time=1.0)

camera.fit(targets, padding=0.5, run_time=1.0, rate_func=...)

Dynamically computes the joint bounding box enclosing a list of objects and fits the viewport around them with clean padding.

# Frame both an Array and a BarChart side-by-side
cam.fit([arr, chart], padding=0.8, run_time=1.5)

camera.follow(target, auto_update=True) & camera.unfollow()

Locks the camera's center position to follow a moving target. - auto_update=True: Attaches an updater callback that pans the camera in real time as the target moves across the screen. - Call cam.unfollow() to detach the updater when target tracking is complete.

# Follow a node moving through a graph traversal
cam.follow(active_node)
self.play(active_node.animate.shift([3, 1, 0]))
cam.unfollow()

camera.reset(run_time=1.0, rate_func=...)

Restores the camera frame to origin (0, 0, 0) with the default screen dimensions (14.22 width $\times$ 8.0 height).

cam.reset(run_time=1.0)

3. Error Handling and Degradation

Camera requires access to a camera frame with .move_to() and .set_width(), which is provided natively by MovingCameraScene.

If Camera is initialized with a standard Scene that does not support camera movement, it raises a clear, actionable error:

from animora.core import Scene, Camera


class StaticScene(Scene):
    def construct(self) -> None:
        cam = Camera(self)  # Raises TypeError with helpful migration instructions

Error Message:
TypeError: Camera requires a MovingCameraScene (or a Scene with a movable camera frame). Got: StaticScene.