Cavalry: Features Galore.

This article started as ’10 cool Cavalry features’, then it needed expanding to 20 as I couldn’t pick 10. Long story short, I compromised on 40.

Warning: Cavalry is beta software and as such some features will get even better.

Import fonts

There’s no need to install a font on your system to use it in Cavalry, just drag it into the Asset Window and you can use it in your project.

BlackOpsOne has been imported, so it can be used without being installed on the system.

Animation Control

Controlling the animation of multiple things at once is a cinch with Cavalry’s animation control. Some of you may be familiar with the term ‘set driven key’, this is Cavalry’s take on that, only with a much easier setup.

Have animation controlled by a slider, rather than the timeline. Who said time can only go forwards!?

Joystick

If the Animation control is a 1d controller, the Joystick is a 2d controller. You can assign keyframes to joystick positions, and then animate the position of the joystick, it makes character rigging a cinch.

Keyframe layers

Cavalry has Keyframe layers! This means you can do base animation in one layer, and then in another add complexity, then fade any additional layers up and down to your hearts content. [WIP]

Real graph editor

That’s right, Cavalry has a real, professional grade, actually competent graph editor. It has real looping (with previews), cycling, oscillating, keyframe alignment, curve ghosting, stepped keyframes and so on. We’re just getting started here, stay tuned for more.

Duplicator built in

Cavalry has a Duplicator, this means creating lots of stuff is easy. Plus, due to Cavalry’s highly original procedural architecture you can save yourself hours of work.

Dynamic rendering

Animate once, render however many times you need. This is versioning made easy, actually not just easy, trivial, in fact not just trivial, brain dead. You get the idea. I cannot stress, nor illustrate with an image, just how game changing this feature is. Watch this tutorial to learn more.

Time Editor Transform tool

A easy scale tool for retiming keys. With (fancy pants) ripple edits.

Project window key bars

Easily retime animation by dragging a key bar.

Key bar hold frames

The key bar will tell you when you have hold frames.

The dashed line means there is no change in the keyframe values. This is just a picture, stop waiting for it to move :)

Copy/ paste keys (between projects)

Because why not.

Colour linking/ Colour Arrays

When the client changes the colour scheme this is no longer the stuff of nightmares, just change the colour in one place and you’re done.

Rubber Hose

Everyone loves a bit of rubber hose style animation and we’ve got you covered here.

Rubber Hose (again)

No really. We’ve got you covered. Rubber Hose ANYTHING.

Constraints

Usually preserved for the world of 3d, we have constraints, things like the transform constraint make ‘picking-up’ and ‘putting-down’ things easy.

Frames that you can see

Zoom in far enough and we’ll help you see where frames are.

End point dragging

Drag end points around like you just don’t care.

Hold alt to move bars on the same frame. Hold shift to snap.

Split Visibility Zones

Need a layer to be visible twice? Or more times? No problem! Just split the bar.

There’s no need to duplicate layers if you simply want to hide/show a layer multiple times.

Introducing the humble Hierarchy

True parenting, because once you have it…

Awesome text features

Generate strings, animate lines, words, characters, all with normal animation curves. No presets needed, just normal animation.

Randomly generated numbers.

“Anything to anything”

We have a philosophy of ‘connect anything to anything’, so the same Noise Behaviour that makes a shape wobble, can also be plugged into it’s rotation. Why learn two workflows when just one will do!

Sound Behaviour

Power animation with sound, built in! [WIP]

Squetch Behaviour

Squash and stretch, ‘nuff said.

Google Sheets

Harness the almighty power of the internets with our Google Sheet integration. Change a sheet online, reload the asset in Cavalry and you’re done.

A Spreadsheet of city populations where the populations are being remapped into colours.

Falloffs

The humble Falloff can do wondrous things.

A Falloff affecting the Trim End of a Stroke.

Variable Fonts

Take advantage of all the cutting edge fonts being developed with this new standard.

This font is called Recursive Mono & Sans and was made by Stephen Nixon

Bounding Box Information

Get the bounding box of one shape, and use that information to make another shape. Simple!

Getting the bounding box of some text, and making a rectangle from that. No expressions!

Convex Hull

Build a shape around other shapes. Great for character work, or just messing about.

Convex Hull around three shapes which are all moved by Noise Behaviours.

Stagger things

You can stagger anything, for example the radius of some circles. You can even stagger time!

Composition Constraint

Constrain things to your composition! No expressions!

Snapping

Snap to bounding boxes, edges, or a grid. More is on the way!

Path Animation

Animate along paths!

Path Deformation

Deform shapes along paths.

Draw a path, then use Pathfinder to deform the text along said path.

Per Character Blur

Not really a feature, more an example of what you can do with a couple of features (sub-mesh behaviour and a blur filter), but I like it, so it counts okay?

Text Shape with a Sub-Mesh Deformer. There is a Blur Filter on the Sub-Mesh, and a Stagger on the Blur ammount.

Color palette to array

Import a palette, and then convert it to an array so you can link colours to things in your scene.

Gradient Animation

Build a crazy animating gradient, because we know you want to!

Graph Animation

Build a crazy animating graph, because crazy animating gradients didn’t do it for you!

Trails

So. Many. Possibilities.

Connect

Everyone one loves a line or two, or thousand. You can do all sorts of rather impressive things with the click and drag of a mouse!

Connecting points. The thickness and colour of the lines is dependent on the length of the connections.