Linear movement in Manim

[VladislavKorecky]

I started learning Manim when I realized that the move_to() command doesn't produce linear movement. In the animation I placed below, the circles seem to first accelerate, before deaccelerating again. The red circle was created with animate.move_to() and the green circle below with MoveToTarget. Both seem to produce the same behavior. I heard that Manim interpolates between the end position and start position to animate, so if I had to guess, Manim uses some sigmoidal interpolation instead of lerp. Is there a way to make the movement linear? Do I have to write my animation or something?

MotionTest.mp4

[uwezi]

That is the normal behavior in Manim. Animations use a "smooth" timescale which first accelerates and then decelerates by default. If you add the following option to your self.play() then a linear timescale will be used: rate_func=rate_functions.linear.

More about the different rate functions and their use you will find in the documentation at https://docs.manim.community/en/stable/reference/manim.utils.rate_functions.html?highlight=rate_func

linMove.mp4

There are plenty of other ways to ensure a pure linear movement or even controlled and accurate accelerated movement, more about which you could learn on the Discord server

keepOnMoving.mp4

AllUpdaterTypes.mp4

[VladislavKorecky]

Thanks a lot!