Animation on SoloSoft

Anime.js v4: The Complete Guide to the JavaScript Animation Engine in 2026

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Anime.js is a lightweight JavaScript animation engine created by Julian Garnier that has powered web animations for over a decade. In 2025, the library underwent its most significant transformation ever: a ground-up rewrite to version 4 (v4) that replaced the monolithic anime() function with a modular, ESM-first API. With over 58,000 GitHub stars and an active npm release stream reaching v4.3.6 by early 2026, Anime.js has proven that a well-designed animation library can thrive in an era of CSS animations and WAAPI.

Version 4 is not merely an incremental update. It is a philosophical shift: instead of one function that does everything, v4 ships discrete, tree-shakeable modules that you import by name. The core animate() function replaces the old anime(). Parameters have been renamed (the value property is now to, easing is now ease), and entirely new systems have been added – spring physics via createSpring, draggable interactions, SVG motion paths, text splitting, and a WAAPI integration weighing only 3 KB. The result is a library that feels both familiar and radically more capable, capable of driving 60 frames per second across 3,000 DOM elements while fitting into modern build pipelines without bloat.

Lottie: Airbnb's Open-Source Animation Library for After Effects on the Web

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

High-quality motion design has become an essential part of modern web and mobile applications, but implementing animations from design tools has traditionally required manual engineering effort. Designers create beautiful animations in After Effects, and developers spend days reproducing them in code. Lottie eliminates this gap entirely by rendering After Effects animations natively using JSON exports.

Originally created by Airbnb and later maintained by the community through LottieFiles, Lottie has become the industry standard for cross-platform animation delivery. The web version, Lottie-web, renders animations as SVG, Canvas, or HTML elements, producing crisp, scalable results that match the designer’s intent exactly.

The workflow is straightforward: a designer creates an animation in After Effects, exports it as a JSON file using the free Bodymovin plugin, and a developer loads that JSON into Lottie with a few lines of code. The animation is resolution-independent, can be controlled programmatically, and has a file size typically measured in kilobytes rather than the megabytes of a GIF or video.

Manim: The Mathematical Animation Engine Behind 3Blue1Brown's Videos

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

If you have watched an educational video on YouTube in the past decade, you have almost certainly seen the work of Manim. The distinctive style of Grant Sanderson’s 3Blue1Brown channel — smooth, precisely animated geometric transformations, equations unfolding in real time, and complex mathematical concepts rendered visually intuitive — is powered entirely by this open-source Python library. Manim stands for Mathematical Animation Engine, and it has democratized the creation of world-class mathematical visualizations.

Sanderson originally wrote Manim as a personal tool to produce the animations for his 3Blue1Brown channel, which has grown to over 6 million subscribers. The library’s first public release came in 2019, and it quickly gained traction among educators, students, and content creators who wanted to bring the same visual clarity to their own projects. The fundamental insight behind Manim is that mathematical animations are not illustrations — they are arguments. A well-designed animation can communicate the logic behind a proof or the intuition behind a concept in a way that static diagrams cannot.