An introduction and some present situations about pi creatures

Sometimes you may see some cute pi’s in 3b1b’s videos. They appear as an episode scene to explain math knowledges more vividly and drive the storyline development of videos. 3b1b’s videos were rendered with Manim and they open source code on GitHub, including pi creature scenes. As a code writer, you may also write Manim, and want to render pi scenes as well. However, the only way to make it at present is to use the cairo-backend branch of 3b1b/manim. But when you copy a part of source code of pi creature scenes that written by 3b1b, you can find that no matter how pi’s mode changes, it is always “plain” because the PiCreature folder only contains one file called “PiCreatures_plain.svg”. Unless we make more SVG files like this, we will never make a vivid pi scene.

3b1b did not put these files on GitHub, because he protects the use of them. This should be respected. As a popular video blogger, he needs an artistic character image to become his symbol. He thinks pi creatures should be protected well as a trademark. However, in fact, pi creatures are not part of Manim because they were excluded from it and they do not have any relations with Manim. So many people contacted us to ask that how to make “emotionful” pi’s, and we put the solution [here](https://github.com/CaftBotti/manim_pi_creatures). It’s good to explore more uses of Manim, but if 3b1b has some limits and requirements, we should always respect him.

Right now, 46 designs have been made, including 41 SVG files from 3b1b's videos, 2 from python code and 3 others. To see all collected pi's, click [here](https://github.com/CaftBotti/manim_pi_creatures).

https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/111475301/235924531-28323bdf-519f-4e9b-98f5-d5a8660e934b.mp4