Cavalry 1.1 is here!
For the last 5 months the team has been exceptionally hard at work on the next iteration of Cavalry and it’s finally out.
This release is absolutely huge, with many leaps and bounds improvements that firmly put Cavalry at the forefront of several design areas and cement its lead in others. There’s still a long road ahead of us, but we’re delighted with the release and we hope you’ll take the time to give it a go and let us know what you think. Below I’ll go over a few of the many new things in the release, be sure to check out our YouTube channel for in depth tutorials.
Lottie Export
Cavalry now has native Lottie Export, making it the first professional motion graphics app to offer this.
Native export allows us to do all sorts of magic behind the scenes to make sure that Duplicators, Magic Easing, animation along a path, Deformers, looping noise, path animation, cel animation and more can be exported as Lottie files with (generally) no work from you, it just works; no more saving a file in order to export a gradient. Lottie is even compatible with Dynamic Rendering, meaning you can output variations of your Lottie animation with very little work. No code A/B testing here we come!
Lottie export requires a Professional licence.
This is our first release of Lottie export and we’re really keen to hear what you think. We’ve supported most of the Lottie format, but not all (things like Text Animators are completely Adobe After Effects™ centric and would be too clumsy an experience for Cavalry so we haven’t added them). Please give us your feedback on what you’d like to be able to do with Lottie from Cavalry. From the very first pitch we wanted to see Cavalry become the go to app for web animation, this is our first step in that direction.
Next Level Text
Rich text is here! Along with that we’re showing off the first steps on our Text 2.0 project which aims to put clear daylight between Cavalry and everyone else when it comes to text animation. Frankly, no one comes close to the level of control you have in Cavalry over character, word and line animation, but we’re not satisfied with that, we feel there are many open goals here, and this release includes a couple of preview features which open new creative possibilities for working with text; with far more to come in the future. We also have a video on YouTube demoing the new features. There are also some new text animation Presets in the Create menu to help get you started, be sure to check them out!
Design Tool Improvements
We completely re-wrote out drawing tools to make them able to handle over 100x the shape complexity of their predecessors. There are also many wonderful quality of life improvements to the drawing tools, to name but a few:
You can close an open curve simply by dragging one end onto the other.
There’s a small arrow that indicates the path direction, you’ll also notice the outline of the first point in each contour is yellow to help signal it. You can change the first point with the new Set First Point item in the Shape menu.
To continue drawing an existing path, simply click on an end point and continue as you’d like (you will see a green circle to indicate how close you need to click to the end point) .
To insert a point into a path, hold ‘s’ (for split), then hover over the path and click where you’d like a new point inserting.
If you hold the Alt key and then press Delete you will open the path at that point, if the path is already open this will convert the path into two separate contours.
There’s also a new transform tool for points, this is toggled with the ‘h’ key.
This is all just the beginning and there are many other improvements included in 1.1. Please let us know what you think, the best way to talk to us directly is on the Discord server, which you can join by clicking here.
What’s Next?
We’re aiming to have another release out quite soon that will include some new filters, beyond that the big ticket items we’re looking at are the Node Graph, Procedural Editing, Dynamics, JavaScript and Cameras. There are exciting times ahead! Lastly, I’d like to thank everyone for their support of Cavalry, we have had such wonderful feedback and seeing the work you all produce in the app puts a spring in our step.
