A Deep Dive Into Cascadeur's Features

In case you missed the news, last week, the 3D keyframe animation software Cascadeur was finally launched after almost three years of beta testing and ten years of development

For those unaware, Cascadeur is a robust AI-powered tool that enables artists to create physically-accurate animations much easier and faster. With this software, one can set up realistic animations of characters of almost any type, including humanoids, characters, and creatures, without using any motion capture.

To help artists and animators to get the hang of the tool more quickly and easily, Cascadeur's developers have recently shared a closer look at the software's features, describing how they work and explaining what they can be used for.

One of the tool's most notable features is AutoPosing – a unique "smart" rig for humanoid characters that enables you to only move several points on the character, with AutoPosing taking care of the rest of the body, resulting in the most natural pose and allowing you to significantly speed up the process of setting up key poses.

If you would like to have full control over the character rig, you can use Cascadeur's standard Point Controller rig instead and set up the poses as precisely as you need. "Working with poses in Cascadeur is very simple: for example, you don't have to switch between IK and FK, you can move any selection as an IK OR rotate it as an FK (at any time)," commented the team.

Moreover, In Cascadeur, any selection of points can be moved or rotated around any pivot. You can use hotkeys for quick selection and copy the position of any points in both local and global space. The Pro version of the software also features a dedicated AutoPosing rig for hands.

On top of that, Cascadeur also features a set of tools to create and adjust character rigs manually; you can set up controllers for just about any model. Physics tools can be used to improve animation, making it more physically accurate. Cascadeur automatically calculates the correct trajectory and velocity for a jumping character based on your animation and gravity. Overall, stated the developers, the software's Physics tools and AutoPosing allow you to experiment with your animation, make fast sketches and try various ideas, just as a choreographer would.

Besides that, the software also includes a full spectrum of standard animation tools, including the ability to import any video to use as a reference, the ability to see the trajectory of any object by selecting this object and frames on the Timeline, and the convenient Graph Editor.

Additionally, the tool comes with the ability to switch between IK and FK interpolation in one click, removing the need to bake animation and simplifying the process of blending different types of kinematics together. Cascadeur also uses a special type of interpolation called Global Rotation, which shares the advantages of the FK but disables any influence from parents.

And as a cherry on top, the software comes with tons of customization features, allowing you to customize the user interface to your liking, change the layout, and choose color schemes and hotkey presets.