pan - puny animator

pan is an program that allows for easily creating animations using Lua. It is primarily geared towards 2D motion graphics.

The commonly used motion graphics software out there sucks. Adobe After Effects is slow and bulky, and Blender isn't geared very well for motion graphics. Both need plugins to make creating nice, satisfying, sequential animations fast and efficient. Why do we have to stick with software that clearly isn't made for this purpose, when we can create a better alternative?

Many people already use Processing for this purpose, but the lack of an interactive preview with a timeline can be a bit frustrating. It's a much more general purpose tool, and while it is fully possible to create animations with it, the experience could be a bit better.

Enter pan: using a simple, but powerful API, embracing the simplicity of Lua as a scripting language, and providing hot reloading to make small edits fast and easy to do, it makes the creation of 2D motion graphics a breeze. Its render times are really fast, and the preview can run your animation in full 60 fps—even when your animation is to be exported in a lower framerate. The preview is capable of running even on low-end hardware, thanks to OpenGL hardware acceleration. Apart from that, pan's API is simple to learn and use. You don't even have to go online for a reference: it's built right in to the program. Simply run pan r and read away!

Installation

nimble install https://github.com/liquidev/pan

Usage

# display help text:
pan
# display API reference:
pan r
# look up reference for rect:
pan r rect

# show preview window:
pan file.lua
# the above is a shorthand for:
pan file.lua preview

# render your animation to a directory next to the luafile:
pan file.lua render
# maybe to a gif, animated webp, or video file (FFmpeg required):
pan file.lua render -x:gif
pan file.lua render -x:webp
pan file.lua render -x:webmVP9

Preview controls

Middle mouse button – pan view
Scroll wheel – zoom in/out
Right mouse button – reset zoom
Q – quit preview
R – reload animation
Space – play/pause
← – previous frame
→ – next frame
Shift ← – 0.25s back
Shift → – 0.25s forward
Ctrl ← – jump to start of animation
Ctrl → – jump to end of animation

Example

Here's an example of a short luafile you can preview with pan <file>:

animation { width = 400, height = 400, length = 3.0, framerate = 25 }

local background = solid(hex"#20d4ac")
local white = solid(gray(255))

local size = 128

function render()
  clear(background)

  push()

  translate(width / 2, height / 2)
  translate(keyframes {
    { time = 0.0, val = -width / 2 - Size / 2 },
    { time = 1.0, val = 0,                    easing = quinticOut },
    { time = 2.0, val = width / 2 + Size / 2, easing = quinticIn },
  }, 0)
  rotate(ease(0, math.pi, 0.0, 1.5, quinticInOut))

  rectf(-size / 2, -size / 2, size, size, white)

  pop()
end

You can find more examples in the examples/ directory.