Cavalry Documentation

Motion Paths allow you to draw and edit paths that represent the direction and speed of selected animated Shapes. They can be enabled or disabled in the Viewport Settings and support up to 10 selected Shapes simultaneously. Appearance options in Viewport Settings include toggling the display of frames, seconds, keyframes, the path, and its direction, as well as setting the path length to represent a specific period of time.

The Sub-Mesh Behaviour allows you to access and affect individual 'child-meshes' within a Shape's hierarchy. This is useful for shapes that contain nested structures, such as Text Shapes (Lines > Words > Characters), SVGs (layers within layers), or Duplicators (Input Shapes). You can manually create mesh hierarchies using Pre-Comps or Groups connected to a Custom Shape to be targeted by a Sub-Mesh.

The Duplicator node is used to copy and distribute Shapes to create grids, circles, and other geometric patterns. It distributes input shapes across a set of points based on the selected Distribution type.

The SkSL Shader node uses SkSL (Skia Shading Language), a variant of GLSL. Because it is based on GLSL, code from sources like Shadertoy can be converted for use in Cavalry with minor modifications. A critical constraint is that the SkSL Shader does not accept integer uniforms; floats must be used instead.

Presets allow users to save and apply pre-configured settings and define defaults for Layers, Compositions, and Render Queue Items. They can be accessed via the header row of a Layer's Attribute Editor UI, the Scene Tree header, or the header row of a Render Queue Item.

Forge Dynamics is a 2D physics engine integrated into Cavalry, built upon the Box2D engine. It allows for physics-based simulations of shapes within a composition.

The Dependency Graph is an interactive schematic window that provides a map of connections within a Composition. Layers are represented as blocks with attributes; input ports are located on the left and output ports on the right. Nodes are color-coded by data type (e.g., int, string, double).

Distributions are used to generate and distribute points that can be used to position Shapes. They are primarily utilized by other layers such as the Duplicator and Connect Shape.

The Rubber Hose Limb is a simple 2-bone Inverse Kinematics (IK) system used to create bendy or straight limbs in Cavalry. It requires a Shape or Line with sufficient divisions to allow for smooth deformation.

Dynamic Rendering allows users to generate different values at render time to create multiple variations of a single Composition. This is useful for procedural artwork, A/B testing, personalized advertising, and automating repetitive workflows (e.g., generating different versions of an endboard). Configuration options are located in the Render Manager.

The Auto-Animate behavior allows you to add a variety of animations to Shapes using only a few keyframes. It is particularly useful for animating sub-meshes (like characters in a Text Shape or items in a Duplicator) by controlling position, rotation, scale, opacity, and visibility through a simplified interface.