Some of your Cavalry questions answered.

The response to Cavalry has been absolutely amazing, and we’ve just sent out the first test build to the initial batch of lucky testers — we’ll be widening the test group over the next few weeks but we are hugely oversubscribed so apologies if we don’t respond to your application.

A great many questions were asked after our first couple of posts, as well as some assumptions being made that were not entirely accurate (easily done, there’s a lot to talk about so we missed out quite a bit) so here are answers to some of your questions.

What Platforms will Cavalry support?

The first test build will support macOS and Windows. A Linux build will come later once we’ve ironed out some existing platform specific bugs.

Is Cavalry 3d?

Cavalry is a 2d animation app. It is our intention to support 2.5d and even 3d in the future. We have already done some R&D in this area, however as we’re sure you can appreciate, this is an enormous task, and we don’t want to rush it. We’ll get 2d right, then we’ll move on to other dimensions.

Is Cavalry node based?

Yes. However you won’t need to use a node graph to use Cavalry, in fact, we haven’t even built a node graph editor yet. We feel very strongly that you should be able to use Cavalry without even knowing what a node is. That said, in the future it is inevitable that we’ll first add a flow graph view, then a node graph editor for our more advanced users.

Does Cavalry have Dynamics and Particles?

Not yet! But we’ll get there. Stay tuned!

Will Cavalry have Scripting?

Yes. But not quite yet. We already have both a JavaScript maths node, and a Python maths node (currently macOS only and it may be removed). We’re looking at using JavaScript for our scripting language for 1.0, but are not against adding Python later (particularly when the VFX Reference Platform moves to Python 3 in 2020).

So just to manage your expectations, we have no script editor yet, but we fully intend to add one.

Will Cavalry have an API?

Yes, when version 1.0 is complete, we will be releasing a public API which has rich access to all areas of the app.

Is Cavalry a fully fledged compositor?

Cavalry is first and foremost an animation app, but we intend to have basic compositing features in 1.0.