How Cavalry came to be
While working at Mainframe I’d created an animation toolkit for Autodesk Maya called MASH. This was later acquired by Autodesk who then hired us to continue working on it — along with other motion graphics and general animation tools. To help with this work Mainframe hired an extremely talented individual called Martin Vejdarski. This all culminated in MASH being considered for a SciTech Oscar in 2018, however, before that happened our contract with Autodesk ran out. Suddenly Martin and I were looking for something to do and it’s here that the story of Cavalry begins.
One of the things that I’d found generally frustrating as an animator was that all animation innovation seemed to be happening in the 3d space. No one was pushing 2d as an area for innovation nor had they been for a long time, and to me it felt like 2d was being left behind. I’d discussed this fact with one of the motion designers at Mainframe on a Friday afternoon and following that I spent the weekend dreaming up what a next generation 2d animation app would look like.
The next Monday I pitched the idea to Martin and Chris (the managing director of Mainframe North), which included many of the core concepts Cavalry is based upon. There was also a (terrible) rudimentary demo showing some example workflows on rails.
Chris and Martin loved the idea and Chris asked us to flesh out the design.
Enter Cavalry
Martin and I firmly believe that to achieve the varied outcomes necessary for modern use cases, digital content creation programs (DCCs) need to be node based. However, we equally believe that an animator shouldn’t be forced to use an inherently complex node editor to access the raw power of a graph. This demand for usability influenced every single layer of our app design.
We spent the next six weeks developing what we think to be some truly innovative ideas which we’ll explore more completely in upcoming posts.
It was amazing to see the ripples of excitement created around the studio by our prototype. Cavalry was swiftly given the green light and the three of us set to work.
A different approach
Cavalry has a different way of thinking when it comes to putting together scenes and once you’ve clicked with it, complex or laborious tasks become a matter of a few clicks. When we designed Cavalry’s engine, the way we wanted a designer to work was at the front of our thinking, and it drove the way the engine functions. We firmly believe that usability doesn’t come from an interface alone, it comes from considerately designing all levels of the app right down to the lowest levels of the engine.
Be it our ‘bi-directional graph’, or the modeless ‘connect anything to anything’ mentality, we regularly pull complexity away from the surface of the app in order to help expedite (and perhaps more importantly to clarify) workflows, and if we did our job right, designers shouldn’t even notice what we did. It took a few attempts(!), but we’re extremely proud of what we’ve managed to do here in terms of making a simple to use yet exponentially useful app.
Dynamic Rendering
Another area we wanted to do something different in Cavalry was managing renders. Instead of transient disposable objects we’d think of renders in terms of deliverables. You’d set up a render once, and trigger it as many times as you liked, no need to add a new render to a queue each time.
One huge benefit of this shift in thinking is that if renders are persistent, you can do magical things with them; you can for example set your render to repeat 10 times, and each of these 10 renders can then adjust something in your scene (resolution, text, colours etc.); this means you can hook your renders up to a spreadsheet, which makes versioning trivial. We highly recommend you give this feature a go!
Scene Group
In December 2019 Cavalry was spun off into a separate company called Scene Group. It’s fair to say that none of us actually had any idea of the scale of the project upon which we were embarking when we started Cavalry. The bar for entry is extraordinarily high for a modern DCC as in many cases you’re going to end up competing with software that has been around for decades. This is a bar we think we have finally reached and we’re delighted to finally release what has been a very enjoyable (and at times, intense) three year long project.
What’s next
There’s no doubt that we’re just getting started; some of the many exciting features we’ve got lined up next include editable motion trails, drawing guides, simulations (currently in beta), scripting, more shaders, more filters, and next generation text features.
The creative possibilities Cavalry affords are literally endless, and we cannot wait so see what the animation community cooks up.
