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Cavalry is amazing. The future (or current already?) king of motion graphics apps. Imagine a simple, 2D version of Houdini and regular After Effects having a b

Cavalry is amazing. The future (or current already?) king of motion graphics apps. Imagine a simple, 2D version of Houdini and regular After Effects having a baby. Except so far Cavalry inherited After Effect's read-only Flow Graph. But a real node editor is planned for the future. By all means download and play with it. They have great mini tutorials on YouTube. Also Cavalry is good inspiration on how to do a UI for artists. They really listen to their users.

egypturnash 5y ago
Can I pick up my stylus and use the drawing skills I've spent ~20y on honing to draw stuff with anything like Illustrator's pencil tool, or does this only let me draw basic shapes/import stuff from elsewhere? I would have downloaded it and answered this question for myself but the "make an account before downloading" step made me roll my eyes and get back to work.
- commieneko 5y ago
  There is a drawing tool that will work with pen tablets. It's not perfect, but it, like a lot of the features, is a start. The end result of the tool is a simplified bezier curve. There is a tolerance slider that lets you control how much smoothing is used in generating the end result of the drawing. I couldn't get it tight enough for finished character drawings done only with the pen, but you can go in and edit the Beziers with the regular Bezier tools. It does work well enough that you can knock out a rough and then clean it up. The real strength of this will to allow you to come in and rig the drawing. There is also a "cell animation" feature that lets you draw individual frames with onion skinning. Again, very basic, but a start. I haven't used these features in production, so I can't really say how well they work under stress. But they've been very evocative of what might be possible as the tool develops.
  - egypturnash 5y ago
    Thanks! I might take a look at it then. Maybe it'll be the right tool to let me idly fiddle around for the fun of it without things like "having flashbacks to working under one of the worst people in animation back in the 00s" around the tool. :)
PostThisTooFast 5y ago
What about Motion? After Effects isn't really a motion-graphics application; Motion is.
TheRealNGenius 5y ago
How do you know that a real node editor is planned, I couldn't find that anywhere on the website.
- sgian 5y ago
  We have a (limited) public roadmap which shows what we're planning to look at next: https://cavalry.scenegroup.co/roadmap/ https://cavalry.scenegroup.co/roadmap/
- virtualritz 5y ago
  I read it in the docs of the Flow Graph widget [1]. [1] https://docs.cavalry.scenegroup.co/user-interface/menus/window-menu/flow-graph https://docs.cavalry.scenegroup.co/user-interface/menus/wind...

egypturnash 5y ago

Can I pick up my stylus and use the drawing skills I've spent ~20y on honing to draw stuff with anything like Illustrator's pencil tool, or does this only let me draw basic shapes/import stuff from elsewhere? I would have downloaded it and answered this question for myself but the "make an account before downloading" step made me roll my eyes and get back to work.

commieneko 5y ago
There is a drawing tool that will work with pen tablets. It's not perfect, but it, like a lot of the features, is a start. The end result of the tool is a simplified bezier curve. There is a tolerance slider that lets you control how much smoothing is used in generating the end result of the drawing. I couldn't get it tight enough for finished character drawings done only with the pen, but you can go in and edit the Beziers with the regular Bezier tools. It does work well enough that you can knock out a rough and then clean it up. The real strength of this will to allow you to come in and rig the drawing. There is also a "cell animation" feature that lets you draw individual frames with onion skinning. Again, very basic, but a start. I haven't used these features in production, so I can't really say how well they work under stress. But they've been very evocative of what might be possible as the tool develops.
- egypturnash 5y ago
  Thanks! I might take a look at it then. Maybe it'll be the right tool to let me idly fiddle around for the fun of it without things like "having flashbacks to working under one of the worst people in animation back in the 00s" around the tool. :)

PostThisTooFast 5y ago

What about Motion? After Effects isn't really a motion-graphics application; Motion is.

TheRealNGenius 5y ago

How do you know that a real node editor is planned, I couldn't find that anywhere on the website.

sgian 5y ago
We have a (limited) public roadmap which shows what we're planning to look at next: https://cavalry.scenegroup.co/roadmap/ https://cavalry.scenegroup.co/roadmap/
virtualritz 5y ago
I read it in the docs of the Flow Graph widget [1]. [1] https://docs.cavalry.scenegroup.co/user-interface/menus/window-menu/flow-graph https://docs.cavalry.scenegroup.co/user-interface/menus/wind...