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What is Cascadeur?

Cascadeur had been on my radar for some time, but after I was asked to try it, I realized it would become a permanent fixture to my personal toolset and pipeline. Being an indie game developer, one has to be resourceful.

I especially appreciated how accessible this was as an animation package and the market it seemed to cater to, offering various licensing options, from monthly to perpetual pro licenses, and a very decent free version.

As an animator, I especially appreciated how quickly this let me work and how easy it was to get a relatively nice amount of polish in a short amount of time.

Embracing AI in Character Animation: The Real Deal

There is a lot of attention and also hype surrounding AI these days, so before getting into this, I thought it helpful to talk about what it is and what it is not. In the quest for a “make art button” Cascadeur is really not a generative program in the way something like Midjourney, Stable Diffusion and others are for creating images.

It does not create your animation for you entirely, you still have to supply it with something to start with. It is before anything else, a fantastic animation program with an extremely interesting and novel way of animating.

Where it shines is the ability to take those initial poses and interpolate between them using its autophysics (or autoposing as it’s called in the program), rapidly adding in that amount of polish that usually takes an animator a little while to build. That being said, the autoposing has some really smart and interesting features that seem to “know” about human anatomy and movement, tying it into the physics simulation.

The result is a very interesting way of animating, that from the short time I’ve been following its development, I’m sure is only going to get better over time, given the open and accessible model they are using. Another term I like that is perhaps more descriptive and free from the excitement (or criticism) surrounding AI might be “assisted” animation. Cascadeur doesn’t really replace the animator, it adds to their efficiency and creative power.

“Cascadeur doesn’t really replace the animator, it adds to their efficiency and creative power.”

Comparing Cascadeur with Similar Packages

I had seen similar features before on packages like Endorphin, but at that time it was more geared towards bigger studios and focused more on simulation than character animation, which is what really caught my attention about Cascadeur.

Like Endorphin, Cascadeur is also based on physics simulation, which allows the characters to move and react realistically to their environment. Cascadeur’s workflow also felt more familiar, allowing the animator to work non-linearly in a more pose-to-pose like fashion.

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Putting Cascadeur to the Test: A Practical Use Case

During this time that I was asked to explore and evaluate the software. I was working with motion capture files that sometimes required quite a bit of cleaning, even if they mostly looked decent at the end of that process. My programmers had requested a short animation from me to test out a new feature that got added last minute into the system they were building.

Because of the short turnaround time, the fact it was only a placeholder animation that would not be used in the production, and because I was still trying Cascadeur out, I decided to put it to use for this test. I blocked out a couple of quick poses and let Cascadeur run the autopose feature.

Once they were looking more or less presentable and sent it off to my programmers as a placeholder so they could get moving on their tasks, I could move on to others, knowing that I would have to send them the update later.

The Aftermath: Reflecting on the Cascadeur Experience

The next day after they had implemented it, they came back with some general feedback about adjustments that needed to be made. As it sometimes happens, I was asked to make small changes to things here and there to adapt the animation to what needs to happen in gameplay.

Curiously, I was asked to “match” the general idea of placeholder animation the programmer said he’d found online, but to change the timing a little, as it was almost perfect for their purposes. When we pulled it up, I was surprised to see that the animation they were referring to was the one I had given them. Looking at it with fresh eyes now, I was amazed at the level of polish on what was only meant to be used for testing purposes.

If this was what I could come up with in such a short amount of time using the limited version of Cascadeur, imagine what I could do with the full version. Even though another animation was eventually used, it was at that point I was convinced this thing would be staying in my pipeline.

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Exploring Cascedeur’s Features: A Deeper Dive

Aside from the impressive autoposing that seems to be one of the main strengths of the tool, one of the things I really enjoyed was the full body Ik on the characters, and the ease with which I could rotate the character’s parts.

Packages like Maya’s Human IK or 3d Studio Max’s Biped have similar features. Like Cascadeur, some of these also allow the animator to pull on different points in the character’s hierarchy while affecting the rest of the character, and locking those points down to the ground where needed.

The difference to me is that Cascadeur is built from the ground up as a character animation package. Being so, it allows the animator to do certain things much more fluidly and quickly, as these features are built right into the way the core features of the program work. For example, rotating an object from multiple points can easily be done simply by right-clicking a selected bone position.

Their order in the hierarchy is not as relevant as it would be in many other packages, so it isn’t necessary to rig this in advance, you can simply choose the point as you go.

“The difference to me is that Cascadeur is built from the ground up as a character animation package”

Understanding the Cascadeur Workflow

In general, Cascadeur feels somewhat more “abstract” than the precision you’re sometimes used to in Maya for example. At times, in the beginning, I missed being able to see the transform values right there in the channel box as you could in Maya, but I feel it’s just a matter of habit.

These properties are still viewable in a lower position of the menu, and many of the other features that I use and love in Maya such as constraints, graph, node and script editors (that makes use of Python), are all there. It’s just that many of these seem to be kept out of the way or not visible at first.

The more I use it though, the more I have the impression this is done deliberately as if to force the animator to focus on the animation itself, rather than technical details that can sometimes interfere with the creative process. And for a program like Cascadeur that handles the clean-up so well, I think this makes a lot of sense.

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Transitioning to Cascadeur: The Learning Curve

The program’s customizable interface is highly intuitive, with a short learning curve, especially if you have an idea of how other 3D programs work. It even includes a hotkey preset for Blender users.

Exploring Rigging Capabilities in Cascadeur

Characters and models can be imported or exported as models or as animation only (fit to an appropriate skeleton).

While I’ve not yet seen a way to attach deformable skin to a skeleton, Cascadeur does make the rigging process for the animation rig extremely easy and practically automatic for humanoid characters through the use of its “quick rigging” tool. It even includes usable rig mappings for popular formats such as Mixamo and Unreal mannequins, almost at the push of a few buttons.

For formats that are not included, it is simply a matter of filling out the bones names on a list. That rig definition can then be stored in JSON format and reused on other characters. Non-humanoid characters can be rigged and animated in the program as well, but they do not yet make use of make use of the powerful autoposing features that can be used on humanoids.

“it frees the animator up to do more actual animation and less cleanupporting the spectator into a virtual world“

A New Philosophy for Animation: The Cascadeur Approach

In a way, the difference between a Cascadeur and a traditional 3D animation program feels kind of like the difference between such a traditional package and a sculpting program such as Zbrush that mostly dispenses the traditional concepts of vertices and UVs, reinterpreting the geometry as the artist sculpts, so the process becomes much more artistic than technical. Cascadeur feels similarly liberating for animation.

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Animating with Cascedeur: Enhancing Creativity and Efficiency

To bring a character to life, it’s often been the case that the animator is giving up a bit of theirs. Be it 2D or 3D, animation has always been a lot of work, and sometimes very technical. Like many others, I’ve been brought up and accustomed to the idea that each frame should be treated as its own individual work of art, showing as much of the story or action as possible.

In crafting all these details, it is sometimes easy to lose track of the essence or main idea behind an animation. The “animus”, or spirit of a character, if you will – that which makes it human and relatable.

As modern workloads and demands increase, tools like Cascadeur are welcome additions to an animator’s pipeline, as it frees the animator up to do more actual animation and less cleanup. Animating in Cascadeur gives the animator a sense of power. It feels a little more like directing than animating sometimes. The detail is all still accessible if you want to dive into it, but right from the start, it lets the animator set those ideas to motion very quickly and get them to a more presentable level.

While Cascadeur is essentially an animation-only package, that does not do modeling or some of the other tasks that a full 3D package does, it complements any other package very well, as its animation features are so powerful and unique, but above all, extremely helpful.

As mentioned in this article, there are a number of “smart” things going on under the hood, but the fantastic user community and openness to indie developers are signals that there are some smart things going on “over the hood” as well.

Conclusion: The Future of Cascedeur

This model has proved successful for programs such as Blender and Unity, among several others. For this reason, and based on what I’ve already seen in the short time I’ve been using it, I can only expect it to develop and improve even more.

You can check it out at: https://cascadeur.com/

This article was written by animator Daniel Coes