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24 alternatives to Visualizing the math that powers 3D character animation

Hi everyone! I'm the author of this project. I wrote it because I think that the math that makes characters move in games and movies is incredibly beautiful, and I wanted to give others a glimpse into it. It's crazy to think that quaternions, an abstract mathematical tool discovered by William Rowan Hamilton in 1843, would be so perfectly suited to solve hard problems in the world of 3D character animation more than a hundred years later. The story of how he discovered quaternions is also beautiful. Here's an excerpt from Wikipedia: "Hamilton was looking for ways of extending complex numbers…

This project visualizes the mathematics behind 3D character animation in games and movies. Created by an author interested in making complex mathematical concepts accessible, it explores how quaternions—an abstract… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Visualizing the math that powers 3D character animation launched in 2022; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

  1. 1

    I went down the rabbit hole on a side project and ended up building this: Strange Attractors(https://blog.shashanktomar.com/posts/strange-attractors). It’s built with three.js. Working on it reminded me of the little "maths for fun" exercises I used to do while learning programming in early days. Just trying things out, getting fascinated and geeky, and being surprised by the results. I spent way too much time on this, but it was extreme fun. My favorite part: someone pointed me to the Simone Attractor on Threads. It is a 2D attractor and I asked GPT to extrapolate it to…

    Oct 2025 · blog.shashanktomar.com · its alternatives →

  2. 2

    I was wondering how I can arrange objects along a spherical helix path, and read some articles on it. I ended up learning about parametric equations again, and make this visualization to document what I learned: https://visualrambling.space/moving-objects-in-3d/ feel free to visit and let me know what you think!

    2025 · visualrambling.space · its alternatives →

  3. 3IM

    This is the first iteration of a short game I’m making that tries to interactively explain some of my favorite math questions / ideas. My goal is mostly to get the player curious and not necessarily to explain absolutely everything. There were a lot of fun technical parts to building this: - For implementation reasons, it’s much easier if the lines all have integer intersection points with each other. To do this, when a new line is added I “cheat” by rounding intersections to integers and then splitting the old lines at the intersection into new linds (with potentially different slopes)…

    2024 · rahulilango.com · its alternatives →

  4. 4

    A virtual reality tool for mathematical modeling! Contribute to matryx/calcflow development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2017 · github.com · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    I'm enthralled with using pen plotters to make generative art. Last August at SIGGRAPH, I built an interactive experience for others to see how code can be used to make visual art. The linked blog post is my trials and tribulations of linking a MIDI controller to one of these algorithms and sending its output to a plotter, so that people may witness the end-to-end experience.

    2024 · lostpixels.io · its alternatives →

  6. 6

    Ever since I remember I had a lot of curiosity regarding hyper dimensional spaces. Picturing higher dimensions, such an impossible yet exciting idea... So years ago I came across a small GIF of a tesseract. Since then it left me wondering how cubes from even higher dimensions would look like... Years passed and I became a software developer, decided to tackle the problem myself and ncube was the result. ncube allows you to visualize rotating hypercubes of arbitrary dimensions. It works by rotating the hyperdimensional vertices and applying a chain of perspective projections to them until the…

    2023 · ncube.ndavd.com · its alternatives →

  7. 7

    Creating high-quality scientific figures can be time-consuming and challenging, even though sketching ideas on paper is relatively easy. Furthermore, recreating existing figures that are not stored in formats preserving semantic information is equally complex. To tackle this problem, we introduce DeTikZify, a novel multimodal language model that automatically synthesizes scientific figures as semantics-preserving TikZ graphics programs based on sketches and existing figures. We also introduce a Monte Carlo Tree Search-based inference algorithm that enables DeTikZify to iteratively refine its…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  8. 8RV

    While studying Geometric Algebra I have built some interactive visualization to demonstrate how geometric transformations (rotation, scaling, translation) can be constructed by just composing reflections. Accepting reflection as the most elementary geometric operation was an eye opening moment for me. I think some of you might enjoy the interactive visuals.

    Aug 2026 · static.laszlokorte.de · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    AI4Animation in javascript & three.js. Contribute to sneha-belkhale/AI4Animation-js development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2019 · github.com · its alternatives →

  10. 10

    Bauble is a toy that I've been working on for a few weeks, and I think it's reached the point where other people could have fun with it! Bauble is based on raymarching signed distance functions, which are kind of like... 3D vector art? They're pretty common in the procedural art community and you can do some amazing things with them, but normally writing SDFs means writing low-level shader code. I wanted to play with SDFs, but I found it very frustrating to translate "I want to rotate this" into "okay, that means I have to construct a rotation matrix, and then apply it to the current point,…

    2022 · bauble.studio · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    Features include: - Several preset periodic orbits: the classic Figure-8, plus newly discovered 3D solutions from Li and Liao's recent database of 10,000+ orbits (https://arxiv.org/html/2508.08568v1) - Full 3D camera controls (rotate/pan/zoom) with body-following mode - Force and velocity vector visualization - Timeline scrubbing to explore the full orbital period The 3D presets are particularly interesting. Try "O₂(1.2)" or "Piano O₆(0.6)" from the Load Presets menu to see configurations where bodies weave in and out of the orbital plane. Most browser…

    Nov 2025 · trisolarchaos.com · its alternatives →

  12. 12MC

    Hi, we're MathGPT! MathGPT creates Khan-Academy-style animated math videos that intuitively explain complex concepts to students, helping them understand how to solve their problems step-by-step. We're currently serving over 2M users, processing 800M tokens / day and growing! If you try it out, we would appreciate feedback on how we can make the overall experience / video generation better! Email me at ygk2[at]cornell.edu.

    2024 · math-gpt.org · its alternatives →

  13. 13

    I use this library I made for Vectors and Quaternions in many personal projects. I've open-sourced it, in case anyone else would get use out of it. I use this on various projects, including quadcopter firmware, a graphics engine, a cosmology simulation, and several molecular dynamics applications. No_std compatible.

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    Scientific visualization meets mathematical animation

    Dec 2025 · manimvtk.mathify.dev · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    Math is about more than just numbers. In this

    2018 · coloring-book.co · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    Recreational Ruby tools for graphics and geometry. - mike-bourgeous/mb-geometry

    2021 · github.com · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    Explore tilings on the hyperbolic plane. Contribute to timhutton/hyperplay development by creating an account on GitHub.

    2014 · github.com · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    Hey HN, I want to share a personal project: I made a tiny pen-plotted book for my wife. I did everything myself—drawings (with some help from Midjourney), plotting, cutting, and binding. I even used a 3D printer to make a helper tool. It's absolutely over-engineered, but I enjoyed it a lot. Multi-disciplinary projects, especially those with a physical output, are a lot of fun for me. The post covers the process in detail, but if you're interested in anything specific, let me know. Cheers!

    2025 · muffinman.io · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    Hi HN, I'm Narek. I built Manim-Web, a TypeScript/JavaScript port of 3Blue1Brown’s popular Manim math animation engine. The Problem: Like many here, I love Manim's visual style. But setting it up locally is notoriously painful - it requires Python, FFmpeg, Cairo, and a full LaTeX distribution. It creates a massive barrier to entry, especially for students or people who just want to quickly visualize a concept. The Solution: I wanted to make it zero-setup, so I ported the engine to TypeScript. Manim-Web runs entirely client-side in the browser. No Python, no servers, no install. It runs…

    Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    Quality 3d graphics for design projects

    2022 · abstract.wannathis.one · its alternatives →

  21. 21

    A system independent tool for interactive image manipulation with Voronoi and Delaunay data structures. - MauriceGit/Voronoi_Image_Manipulation

    2019 · github.com · its alternatives →

  22. 22AA

    Find information, resources and relevant links for fofpx.com. This domain may be for sale.

    2020 · fofpx.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23IP

    Interactive toy for visualizing relationship between polynomial roots and coefficients

    2017 · duetosymmetry.com · its alternatives →

  24. 24IW

    I’ve been working on a puzzle game for a few years as a side project. The game is based on a small region of tiles in a grid that is mirrored, modified, and mirrored again. It’s based on a novel phenomenon I noticed where, once these mutations happen a few times, the original region can be hard to recognize. You have a feeling there are symmetries in the image, but they are just out of grasp. Going further, if only part of the region is visible, such as mirroring off the edge of the board, it adds to the feeling and it becomes a satisfying puzzle to solve. I originally published this on the…

    2024 · hidden-mirrors.com · its alternatives →

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