Cavalry – 2D Animation Software for Mac and Windows | Hacker News Reader

Cavalry – 2D Animation Software for Mac and Windows

cavalry.scenegroup.co

74 pointsdavidbarker22 comments

It looks cool, but I really hate subscription pricing. At least let me keep the last fully functioning version I had a license for like JetBrains does.

I went digging in the Terms and Conditions to see if there was such a thing allowed and I saw this bizarre item on the thou-shalt-not list for users:

> Disparage, tarnish, or otherwise harm, in our opinion, us and/or the Site. [0]

Is there some UK legal definition of "disparage" that I'm not aware of, or are they basically saying "don't you dare talk any smack about us or we'll ban you so hard"?

Maybe that's in everything these days and I just never noticed.

[0] https://cavalry.scenegroup.co/terms-and-conditions/

I could never use subscription software with a clause like that in a professional context. That's far too much risk to take on.

I can picture the response from them already too - "oh we would never use this clause to silence criticism of our product, that's not the intent" etc. If that's the case, then rewrite your contract so that it doesn't say you can do that - people write legal terms of use instead of ad hoc verbal agreements for a reason.

It's a shame too, because it seems like a pretty good tool otherwise.

Are you a professional motion graphics artist? Just curious.

Immediate “no” from me.

it means if you dare to give us a negative review, we will sue you.

Also a shoutout to Blender which also had a lot of 2D animation upgrades in recent times.

While we're on shoutouts and recommendations, I've recently started playing with Wick Editor[0], which is a very good, simple, open source flash-style animation authoring tool. SVG import, mp4 and HTML5 export.

I'm intending to use it soon for some animations to communicate some concepts better over video. The only real limitation I've come across so far is a lack of shape tweening, which would be a very nice to have.

[0] https://www.wickeditor.com/

Thar actually looks pretty good! Gonna give it a spin.

Thanks for the recommendation. Looks really cool.

I haven't fired up Blender in years. I'll check it out.

"... in our opinion"??? That means they don't have to prove anything; they just have to believe it, and boom: you're in violation.

Bonus points: their website doesn't let you copy the text from the "Terms and Conditions." It's just that text, not the rest of the page, so it's a deliberate choice. Run, run, run away.

I was wondering if anyone else ran into that with the copy/paste! I had to type it out manually and just figured it was my mobile browser being crappy.

Yeah, no thanks!

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.

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.

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.

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. :)

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

We have a (limited) public roadmap which shows what we're planning to look at next:

https://cavalry.scenegroup.co/roadmap/

I read it in the docs of the Flow Graph widget [1].

[1] https://docs.cavalry.scenegroup.co/user-interface/menus/wind...

Some of the concepts here seem similar to my experimental SVG tool Coil (https://akx.github.io/coil/) from 2018. Guess I was on the right track there. :)

Cavalry is amazing and pretty disruptive. It’s much easier toLearn and it’s working fast. It’s a great example of magical software design.

terrible subscription model. Tried to download but they force you to sign up. The free version has a watermark which means anything you do on it is unusuable.

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