camera-techniques

A guide to controlling the camera in Manim, a Python tool for creating mathematical and technical animations.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to add zooms, pans, saved and restored views, focus changes, and line-width adjustments to 2D animations.
Why use it?
It provides patterns for changing what viewers see without manually working out every camera position and size.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the mathviz plugin — 6 skills, 4 commands, 6 agents shipped together

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/choxos/mathvizagent/camera-techniques
Any agent
npx skills add choxos/MathVizAgent --skill camera-techniques
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/choxos/MathVizAgent

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install mathviz, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 6 skills, 4 commands, 6 agents.

Per session 24 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,110 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00024 $0.02110
Opus 5 $0.00012 $0.01055
Sonnet 5 $0.00005 $0.00422
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00211

Measured 2d ago against content hash e882613ca96f, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

camera-techniques scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

plugins/mathviz/skills/camera-techniques/SKILL.md · 410 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 410 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Camera Techniques

Cinematic camera techniques for Manim animations.

MovingCameraScene (2D)

Basic Setup

from manim import *

class MyScene(MovingCameraScene):
    def construct(self):
        # self.camera.frame is the camera
        # It's a VMobject that can be animated

        # Save initial state
        self.camera.frame.save_state()

        # ... scene content

Camera Properties

# Get current properties
self.camera.frame.width      # Frame width
self.camera.frame.height     # Frame height
self.camera.frame.get_center()  # Camera position

# Set properties
self.camera.frame.set(width=10)
self.camera.frame.set(height=6)

Zoom Operations

Zoom In (Make Larger)

# Scale down frame = zoom in
self.play(
    self.camera.frame.animate.scale(0.5),  # 2x zoom
    run_time=2
)

# Zoom to specific height
self.play(
    self.camera.frame.animate.set(height=4),
    run_time=2
)

Zoom Out (Show More)

# Scale up frame = zoom out
self.play(
    self.camera.frame.animate.scale(2),  # 0.5x zoom
    run_time=2
)

Zoom to Object

# Fit object in frame with padding
target = some_mobject

self.play(
    self.camera.frame.animate
        .set(height=target.height * 1.5)
        .move_to(target),
    run_time=2
)

Zoom Levels

Scale Factor Effective Zoom Use Case
0.25 4x zoom in Fine detail
0.5 2x zoom in Detail view
1.0 Normal Overview
2.0 0.5x zoom out Wide shot

Pan Operations

Pan to Object

self.play(
    self.camera.frame.animate.move_to(target),
    run_time=1.5
)

Pan to Coordinates

self.play(
    self.camera.frame.animate.move_to([3, 2, 0]),
    run_time=1.5
)

Pan with Offset

# Center slightly above target
self.play(
    self.camera.frame.animate.move_to(target).shift(UP * 0.5),
    run_time=1.5
)

Combined Operations

Zoom + Pan

Read the full file on GitHub · 410 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 2d ago First seen · 410 lines · 24 tokens per session scan A e882613ca96f

Subscribe to this mod's changes

camera-techniques is a skill published in the GitHub repository choxos/MathVizAgent (1 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 24 tokens to every session and 2,110 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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