Cavalry—creative freedom

Setting 2d animation free.

As we’re building up to Cavalry’s 1.2 release we wanted to let you know about some upcoming changes to our licensing that will come into effect as part of the release.

So what’s happening?

The Free licence will lift some of the current output restrictions by:

• Removing the watermark.
• Increasing the resolution cap to 1920 x 1080 px.

The main driver behind this change is to make Cavalry more accessible to more people and easier for creatives to get more familiar with the workflows in their day-to-day projects.

It can be challenging to find the time to learn a new piece of software, especially if your days are already spent working on live projects for clients. Even if you know there are faster ways to get your work done, in the rush of trying to a project out of the door, committing the time to learning is often something for ‘next time’. We want more people to experience the creative possibilities and time benefits Cavalry offers and so we’re planning on making that easier.

This move will mean that all these features (and more) will become unrestricted to use:

• Duplication— duplicate and distribute shapes with ease.
• Data — use .csv data to drive your creative.
• Text —put Cavalry’s best in class text features to use for procedural animation and manipulation.
• Drawing tools — Cavalry’s Pen and Pencil are improving all the time meaning you can spend less time swapping artwork between apps.
• Snapping — snap shapes to grids, guides, bounding boxes and more.
• Colour Palettes — link your artwork’s elements to scene colour palettes so they can all be updated in one fell swoop.
• Rig Control — set up character animation using a joystick.
• Rubber Hose — create Rubber Hose Limbs with ease.
• Cel animation — create frame by frame animation in Cavalry.
• Magic Easing — add one click ease, bounce, spring and anticipation to your keyframes.
• Filters — Blur, Chromatic Aberration, Pixelate, Halftone and more.
• Masking — use the same mask on multiple shapes.
• Booleans — use booleans to cut shapes out from one another.
• Morph — easily morph between complex shapes.
• Animate along a Path — deform and move shapes along paths.
• Quad Tree—create mathematical grids.
• .svg support — import/ export vector illustrations from/ to other applications.
• Tags — organise and filter your layers.
• Export—export to various file formats including .mov, .jpeg, .png, .svg, .mp4, .apng, .webm.
• and more…

This will make Cavalry 1.2 the most feature rich, free, 2d animation software available giving everyone access to the joy of real-time playback. 🙌

Sam Turner, Lead Designer Publicis Sapient

If you’re a student or a hobbyist this change will make learning Cavalry and 2d animation in general more accessible. If you’re a non-profit then Cavalry can become a powerful part of your communications strategy with no impact on your bottom line.

You can sign up for Cavalry free over at cavalry.scenegroup.co 🎉.

Professional workflows

As part of this change some existing and upcoming features will sit behind the Professional licence so, as a monthly or annual subscriber, you’ll also enjoy access to the following features:

• Uncapped resolution—export animations at any resolution you like

• Lottie Export—export animations to the web friendly Lottie (.json) format.
• Google Sheets Asset—import data to drive your animations via Google Sheets.
• Control Centre—promote the most important attributes of your Compositions for easy access — great for rigging and sharing complex scenes with colleagues or clients.
• CLI—the Command Line Interface enables various tasks including rendering without the need to launch Cavalry itself.
• All beta features including Motion Stretch, Split Path Utility, Sub-Mesh Bounding Box, Rectangle Pattern Shape, Apply Layout, Layout Shape, Velocity Magnitude Context, Velocity Context, Simple Value Solver, Simple Value2 Solver, Array Manipulator, Trails, Noise Shader, Levels, SkSL Shader, Spring, Apply Distribution, Sound.

In addition, this change means that Free users will now be able to share their scene files with other Professional users and, as a Free user, you will be able to open any scenes using Professional features in read only mode to ‘try before you buy’.

Sign up for a monthly or annual subscription to Cavalry over at cavalry.scenegroup.co.

The Cavalry 1.2 release is currently scheduled for October 2021.

🚀