Additional UI elements for manimsideview for animation number and last frame mode

[hmeine]

I have only just started using manim (and your extension) a few hours ago, but when composing a longer scene, the --from_animation_number option looks very useful to me (saving rendering time). Even --save_last_frame looks attractive when optimizing the placement of many items. Wouldn't it be very useful to be able to specify such options, ideally even with some UI elements (like an animation number input field or a checkbox for save last frame) in the side view?

[Rickaym]

Interesting idea for the sideview elements, what do you reckon would be the most useful ones? Otherwise you can pass options to the manim renderer through the setting manim-sideview.commandLineArgs.

[e-dervieux]

I love the idea. In particular a "last frame" mode which only renders the last frame would be very nice! (because we can always write if Wrong: and TAB-shift the code past a certain point to render the current frame at a certain position in the code)

[hmeine]

Well, the most useful ones I found to be using on the commandline are:
-n <start_anim> (for when everything before that is looking fine to me and I want to save time on rendering & viewing)
-n <start_anim>-<end_anim> for when I later decide to optimize a middle part
-s for optimizing the layout

I just found that -s can even be combined with -n to show the last frame of a certain <end_anim> (no need for the scene code changes @e-dervieux suggested).

The -s could just be a checkbox. -n could be two integer entry fields, but it should be possible to leave the end_anim empty. (start could default to 0.)