Go Pro with Cavalry
Cavalry’s free Starter licence offers a huge array of creative possibilities for animators. Features including drawing tools, keyframe animation, text, duplication and data import are all free to use so why bother with a Professional licence? Here are 8 (well 9+) good reasons why…
Forge Dynamics
Forge Dynamics is a 2d physics engine built on the amazing Box2D by Erin Catto. If you’re an After Effects user and have used the 3rd party plug-in Newton you’ll already know how good it is.
Cavalry builds on that foundation with a tight integration allowing for some interesting creative possibilities alongside other features like the Duplicator. It includes Fields to attract, direct and dampen a shape’s movement alongside Collision Events meaning shapes can be set to change colour and other properties when they collide with one another.
Combined with other Cavalry features like Falloffs and Dynamic Rendering the possibilities are endless.
And of course, as a native feature there are no additional costs to add dynamic simulations to your workflow. 😀
Scripting
Cavalry 1.3 introduced our Scripting APIs which provide access to layers and data within a Scene making it possible to write scripts to perform custom workflows. This includes creating Layers, setting Attributes, making connections and much more. It’s also super easy to create UIs (user interfaces) for your scripts so you can include them as windows in your workspace for easy access or even share them with other Cavalry users.
JavaScript Editor
You can write and test scripts (including scripts with UIs) in the JavaScript Editor which includes tabs, syntax highlighting, line numbering plus the ability to load and save scripts.
JavaScript can also be used to create your own utilities, custom shapes and even deformers via the JavaScript Utility, JavaScript Shape and JavaScript Deformer layers. Try them out via a preset within the Create > Scene Presets > JavaScript menu.
Pre/Post-Render scripts
JavaScript can also be used to tell Cavalry to perform certain actions before or after a render is complete. For example, you could “import a video to the Assets Window after a render is complete”, “write metadata to a file using information in the scene before a render starts” or “populate data using REST APIs”.
We’re proud to say that aescripts.com now has its first Cavalry script for Viewport guides called MVRK created by the fantastic https://www.aeriform.io/.
Lottie Export
Lottie is an open source animation file format originally created by the team at Airbnb. Because Lottie is vector based, files can be very lightweight, scalable and rendered natively on mobile and the web. The format is gaining in popularity and is now the centre of a thriving LottieFiles community.
Cavalry makes it possible to natively export your creations to Lottie’s lightweight .json format which can then be used on other platforms like Wordpress, Figma, Webflow, iOS, Android and, of course, Medium.
Like Forge Dynamics, it’s native so there are no extra costs to add Lottie to your workflow. 😀
Control Centre
The Control Centre is a window to promote the most important attributes in your scene for quick and easy access. This can be particularly useful for complex rigging or for sharing scenes with colleagues or clients.
Any attribute within a scene can be added to the Control Centre meaning you can surface the most important controls — it’s as easy as right click > Add to Control Centre!
As a simple example — we use the Control Centre internally for our newsletter header. A template has been created in Cavalry and then the relevant attributes have been promoted to the Control Centre. This means someone in our marketing department can open up the file, update the fields in the Control Centre and hit the render button. No need to dig through the multiple layers in the Scene Window looking for the relevant attribute or understand anything about the scene.
Dynamic Rendering
Dynamic Rendering can be used to generate different values at render time and so generate many variations of the same single Composition. A natural companion to Dynamic Rendering is data — by connecting Dynamic Rendering to a Spreadsheet, every row of that spreadsheet can then be used to generate a new and unique version of the creative.
The advantages of this workflow are profound. Set up one piece of creative and then let Dynamic Rendering do the hard work of exporting each version for you. This can be put to work for 10, 100, 1000 or millions of renders!
Designer Mark Clarke used Dynamic Rendering alongside the Composition Constraint to create a variety of products, prices, buttons and call to actions at different aspect ratios from one piece of creative.
See Mark’s original Instagram post here.
I’ve tried this in AE for years using Master/Essential Properties/expressions but none worked as well as this first attempt in Cavalry.
Dynamic Rendering is great for:
- Automating otherwise time consuming and error prone workflows.
- Language translations.
- Versioning.
- A/B testing.
- Generating personalised advertising content.
- Creating variations on abstract procedural artwork (hello NFTs!).
- And more…
Now when that ‘signed off’ creative you’ve painstakingly rendered out and checked 100 times comes back with a last minute amend, you can simply make the change once, set off your renders and go enjoy your weekend!
Google Sheet Asset
A Google Sheet Asset can be used as an input to the Spreadsheet Utility as an alternative to static .CSV data. Importing data from a Google Sheet means your data can be edited in a browser, by anyone, anywhere and updated instantly in Cavalry.
In the example above, the data from a Google Sheet is being used to drive the team names, colours and score of an animation. By updating the data, the animation is instantly updated to reflect the change.
Check out our Do it with Data article for some more examples of using data with your animations.
Unrestricted Resolution
In the free Starter version of Cavalry, renders and exports are restricted to 1920 x 1080px. You can work in a Composition of any size but any output will be resized to a maximum of either of those dimensions. By going Professional, this restriction is lifted meaning you can render to any resolution.
Solvers
Solvers can store the values from previous frames in order to accumulate and/ or fade them over time. This means you can create effects that change and evolve over time. A Professional licence opens up access to the Value and Value2 Solvers.
Beta Features
Cavalry is iterating fast with new features constantly in development. As a Professional user you also have access to the latest beta features including:
- Apply Distribution—arrange Sub-Meshes (Duplicator, Text, SVGs etc.) into distributions.
- Apply Layout — stack Shapes within a Sub-Mesh in a similar way to the Layout Shape.
- Layout Shape — stack Shapes to create responsive vertical, horizontal or grid layouts.
- Motion Stretch — deform a Shape based on its velocity.
- Rectangle Pattern Shape — create stacked bar/ pie/ ring charts and barcodes.
- SkSL Shader — write your own shader in SkSL (based on GLSL).
- Sound — use audio to drive deformation or values.
- Spring — add dynamic, secondary motion to a Shape’s position keyframes.
- Sub-Mesh Bounding Box — create rectangles using the bounding boxes of Sub-Meshes (Duplicator, Text, SVGs etc.).
- Trails — generate trails (lines) from Shape movement.
- Trim Path Utility — segment Paths into smaller sections.
- Velocity Context — add this to a Shape within a Duplicator to extract the Shape’s direction.
- Velocity Magnitude Context — add this to a Shape within a Duplicator to extract the Shape’s speed.
