The development of Cascadeur started over 15 years ago, and at the time the idea was to create software that would become an ultimate stuntman, hence the name, free of any limitations and boundaries, able to perform any tricks or combos while also being physics-based and easy to use.
Back then
I only wanted to introduce physics to the animation with a quest to simplify the whole process, which turned out to be a much tougher challenge than I ever expected.
Now physics tools are just a part of what today’s Cascadeur has to offer, it is a part of a complete set of tools, including the AI-assisted ones, that dramatically speed up and simplify the animation process. Which in fact has become our core mission, to get AI to help and assist the animators and not replace them.Besides that, multiple AAA game dev companies have already started using Cascadeur in their upcoming projects.How does Cascadeur ensure ease of use while maintaining advanced functionality for animators?A lot of features in Cascadeur have multiple layers to them. The first thing you see is usually the simplest
How does Cascadeur streamline the animation process for creators and studios?
Anyone who works with mocap or animation assets, once imported to Cascadeur, can one-click retarget the animation onto their character, use Animation Unbaking to turn baked animation into a set of keyframes, which in turn will clean it up and allow them to edit the poses, change the timing, etc. Then turn on AutoPhysics to bring everything together and make the changes physically accurate. And, by adjusting a few sliders, they can add extra physics attributes such as secondary motion, to bring life and subtle details to the animation.
There’s also a unique set of
AI-assisted tools that makes creating any animation from scratch easier and faster.
Can you tell us more about Cascadeur’s key features and what sets it apart from other animation software?
First of all, we have Auto Posing. It’s a smart recent mobile phone number list AI control rig for humanoid characters, trained on hundreds of thousands of poses. The idea is that you only move a few points and the Auto Posing predicts the position of the rest of the body resulting in the most natural pose. It’s fully up to you which points to control and which to leave to AI. It dramatically speeds up the keyframe process and also helps fix poses and animation when cleaning up mocap.
Then we have Auto Physics
which helps you bring your animation together. It shifts the character’s center of mass, adds inertia, builds correct ballistic trajectories for the jumps, and calculates accurate rotation, allowing the animator to focus on the creative aspect instead. It also helps to make sure the changes made to any animation are seamlessly integrated.and fix the majority of content plan andom flickers and glitches, almost with a single click of a button. Check out the Corridor Crew’s video on YouTube.
One of our latest additions
Animation Unbaking, is a tool that greatly simplifies the process of working with any baked animation, where every frame is a keyframe. Should it be motion capture data, any asset or generated animation, it will automatically determine essential keyframes and choose the best interpolation for the intervals. As a result you get a fully editable keyframe animation ready to further work with. Now this feature also works with any non-humanoid characters as well.
Can you share a success story
Where Cascadeur significantly enhanced a project’s animation quality?
I’d like to mention a few. Shadow Fight, a successful PVP game series, is very much renowned for the quality of the animations, all of which were alb directory made in Cascadeur. Most of them were done by hand taking full advantage of the physics tools, which would’ve been impossible otherwise, to obtain such a large amount of mocap data for so many fighting styles portrayed in the game.
Spine is another one of
Our projects featuring intense Gun Fu style and insane animations, which it was heavily praised for at the latest Gamescom 2024 SPINE Gameplay Trailer | Bosses & Parkour Reveal Rooftops and Alleys, a game made by a solo indie developer, Michael Losch. Michael managed to create an insane amount of highly dynamic and realistic parkour animations, which was made possible largely due to Cascadeur’s physics-based tools. You can read more about Michael’s journey and the success of Rooftops and Alleys in this GameWorldObserver article.
Cascadeur has also made a
Significant impact on projects by renowned CGI teams. One notable example is the work we did with the Corridor Crew, a huge VFX channel on YouTube. In a couple of their projects, once they achieved impressive results with facial animations using the latest deep fake technology, they turned to Cascadeur to ensure that the rest of the character animations would be on par with it. Using Animation Unbaking, they were able to clean up dozens of thousands of frames of mocap data.
