Cascadeur Reviews:Animate with autoposing, autophysics and secondary motion
About Cascadeur
Cascadeur is 3D animation software with AI-assisted tools that help you pose characters, simulate physics, and add secondary motion efficiently. It features a custom interface with powerful features like auto-rigging, intelligent posing, physics simulation, and customizable secondary motion to streamline the animation process for beginners and experts alike. Cascadeur works with most common file formats so you can easily integrate it into any animation workflow.
THE EASIEST WAY TO ANIMATE
AI-ASSISTED KEYFRAME ANIMATION SOFTWARE
You make keyframe animation – Cascadeur helps you with posing, physics and secondary motion.
AI-assisted tools
Why Cascadeur?
Cascadeur is a standalone software for 3D keyframe animation of humanoid or other characters. Never before making animation from scratch or editing one has been so easy and fun. Thanks to its AI-assisted tools, you can make key poses really fast, instantly see physical result and adjust secondary motion. All while retaining full control at any point.
EASY TO RIG
Drag-and-drop joints of your character in our Quick Rigging Tool to generate the rig automatically. Rig standard skeletons from Daz3d, Character Creator, Mixamo, Unreal Engine, Metahuman or Player.me with one click. You can customise the auto-generated rig or even create your own for non-humanoid characters.
EASY TO POSE WITH AI
Our unique intelligent rig powered by neural networks helps you create poses easier and faster. Just move the main control points and the AI will position the rest of the body automatically. You are free to move any point to retain full control over the result.
EASY TO PHYSICS
AutoPhysics Tool allows you to achieve realistic and natural motion, while altering your animation as little as possible. The suggested animation is displayed on a green instance of your character. You can easily snap it to your character once you are happy with the result.
ADD LIFE WITH SECONDARY MOTION
Easily add any secondary motion with our dedicated tool. Customise the effect at any interval for any body-part separately. Shake, bounce and overlap to make your animation come alive.
ENJOY A FULL RANGE OF ANIMATION TOOLS
Cascadeur offers a vast variety of animation tools e.g. Trajectories, Ghosts, Copy Tool, Tween Machine, IK/FK Interpolation, Graph Editor, Video Reference Import, Cameras and many more! We are trying to make all our tools easy to use and constantly adding new ones to the software.
FAQ:
Is there a MAC version of Cascadeur?
Yes, Cascadeur does support Mac since the version 2023.1 (May 19, 2023). Please see the System Requirements page to check that your hardware is supported by Cascadeur.
Why does Cascadeur crash when I try to open a scene?
1. Please make sure that your computer meets the minimum requirements.
2. If the requirements are met, please send an email to our technical support team at [email protected]. In the email, please attach the problematic .casc scene file, your crash dumps, log files and dxdiag files.
Crash dumps are located at C:\Users\user_name\AppData\Local\CrashDumps
Log files are located at C:\Users\user_name\AppData\Local\Nekki Limited\Cascadeur\logs
DxDiag file can be found by pressing the Start button, entering “dxdiag” and selecting the dxdiag entry in the results.
When I import an animation to Cascadeur, I get an error “No animation data to paste. Error in pasting animation or timeline data.”
Most of the time this happens when there’s no animation data that could be pasted into your scene, meaning:
1. There’s no animation in the file you’re trying to import.
2. Animation data in this file is either corrupted or in incompatible format.
Another possible reason why the error pops up is that the skeleton hierarchies of the character in the scene and that of the character in the fbx file you’re importing don’t match 100%. If you’re certain that the skeleton hierarchies are supposed to be matching, you can try the following steps:
1. Select the scene character’s entire skeleton hierarchy
2. Import the animation file via the “File → Import Fbx/Dae → Animation to selected objects” command
Is it possible to attach a sword or any other object to a character’s hand?
Yes, this is possible.
If you’re content with simply attaching the prop mesh to the character’s hand joint, you can do so with the following steps:
1. Create a new animation track for the prop by pressing Ctrl + Shift + N. You can change the name’s track to match your prop’s name.
2. Select the prop animation track on the timeline and add the prop mesh to the scene using the File → Import Fbx/Dae → Scene.
3. Select the prop mesh in the Outliner window and drag it over the hand/weapon joint – this will parent the mesh to the joint. Alternatively, you can select the prop mesh, the hand/weapon joint and parent them together with the command at Commands → Transform → Set parent.
4. Make sure that the timeline keyframe cursor is set on the first frame and adjust the prop mesh’s local position and rotation to fit the hand – it can be done either manually or by adjusting the local parameters in the Object properties window.
You can also add a rig to the weapon, either by using the Quick Rigging tool or manually creating the rig elements for it.
If you would like to use the Quick Rigging tool, please check out the tutorial page.
If you would like to do it manually, please check out the documentation page on how it can be done.
Why AutoPosing doesn’t work with my character?
Currently, AutoPosing can only work with rigs adhering to certain requirements.
The easiest way to build such a rig is to use the Quick Rigging Tool:
1. Enter the Rig mode with your character imported in the scene.
2. Open the Quick Rigging Tool (Objects → Quick Rigging Tool).
3. Set appropriate joints for every field in the window to the right by dragging the joint entries into a corresponding field.
Please note that for Cascadeur to be able to create the AutoPosing rig for your character, you would need to fill all of the fields in the Body section of the Quick Rigging tool, except for the “weapon” fields.
See the Quick Rigging Tool and Quick Rigging Tool page to learn more about how to do this.
Can I train AutoPosing with my own data?
Unfortunately, it’s not possible at the moment, but we are looking forward to expanding the capabilities of our autoposing tool by cooperating with companies that have a large amount of animation data to feed the neural network.
Does Cascadeur support scripting?
Yes, Cascadeur does support scripting with Python 3.8.
You can learn more about scripting in Cascadeur on the documentation page and the Cascadeur API page.
Does Cascadeur support importing and exporting animations from third-party software?
Yes, you can import and export both animations and stand-alone models in widely popular FBX and Collada (DAE) formats.
There is also an option to export animations into video files.
Rotation is distorted during interpolation
If an animation you create ends up looking like this:
This is caused by incorrectly placed Additional Controllers.
Additional Controllers are used in combination with Main and Direction controllers to set the rotation for corresponding Rigid Bodies. This means that they should be placed at an angle to the line defined by Main and Direction Controllers, as shown on the image below, on the left side:
Left: a correctly placed Additional Controller. Right: an Additional Controller with an incorrect position.
When this angle is zero, – or close to zero – the software won’t be able to correctly calculate the rotation values for the Rigid Bodies, which in turn would lead to the distortion shown above.
So the solution for such an issue would be moving incorrectly placed Additional Controllers to their proper positions:
1. Enable Rig Mode:
2. Select the controllers.
3. Use Manipulators to place them at appropriate places.
4. Rebuild the rig by clicking Generate rig:
Alternatively, you can simply disable the Rig Mode.
Either way, the updated rig should work correctly.
To learn about placing Additional Controllers see the Additional Controllers page.
To learn more about Additional Points and Point Controllers in general, see these pages:
UI text is illegible
This happens because your OS has the ‘Block untrusted fonts’ feature enabled. Because of this, the system block loading any fonts other than the ones that are already installed in the system. This, in turn, which leads to problems with programs that use their own fonts, including Cascadeur.
There are two ways to solve this issue.
First, you can install fonts used by Cascadeur into the system. Font files can be found in the [Cascadeur main directory]\resources\fonts folder.
A second way would be to add the cascadeur.exe file to the list of exceptions in the system registry. To do this:
1. Run PowerShell as an administrator.
2. Execute the following two commands:
New-Item -Path “HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Image File Execution Options” -Name “cascadeur.exe”
New-ItemProperty -Path “HKLM:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Image File Execution Options\cascadeur.exe” -Name “MitigationOptions” -Value “0x2000000000000” -PropertyType “QWORD”
A Unicode error appears when I try to save the scene
This happens because your system has non-Unicode characters. To solve this issue, please do the following steps:
1. Go to Windows Settings → Time & language → Language & region → Administrative language settings → Change system locale, and turn on Beta: Use Unicode UTF-8 for worldwide language support
2. Restart your PC for the changes to take effect
After that, you should be able to save your scenes
Customer Reviews
Cascadeur is a software for 3D keyframe animation of humanoid or other characters. AI-assisted tools help you to make key poses really fast, instantly see the physical result and adjust secondary motion. All while retaining complete control at any point.
The team has been working hard on this product for a long time. Very impressive progress. This is the type of tools creators need to continue to innovate. I’ve been impressed with what creators have already built with this tool and excited to see what creators continue to build with it. Congrats on the launch!
My name is Eugene Dyabin. I am the co-founder and thought leader behind Cascadeur, an AI-based character animation tool. The idea for Cascadeur appeared 16 years ago when I was at University. Back then it was an in-house project for “Shadow Fight”, our mobile fighting series. Animation has always been my passion?, and I never understood why animation software has to be so complicated?. My personal goal is to make animation accessible for everyone, allowing even beginners to get a physically realistic result. Cascadeur was officially released on 22 December 2022. Over 100,000 users had registered during the beta and early access phases, and numerous well-known AAA studios are now considering using Cascadeur for their future games. And we want to keep developing our software and make it more convenient and intelligent! Cascadeur is a standalone software for 3D keyframe animation of humanoids and other characters. Our main specs are: ?AutoPosing is an AI-based tool which lets you move the main control points while the AI positions the rest of the body automatically ☝️AutoPhysics Tool helps you make animation physically accurate in one click ?Secondary Motion will add various subtleties and bring your animation to life ✊You retain full control over your animation at any point I hope you enjoy Cascadeur! Let me know what you think! I’ll greatly appreciate that. Thanks a lot!?
How does Cascadeur’s physics-based approach streamline the animation process? You need to put less keyframes and less mouse movements when putting each keyframe. Autophysics corrects dynamic balance, makes correct jumps and preparation before a jumps, adds compensation and inertia. Also, you can adjust secondary movements. This approach is much faster than doing it by hand. And the result is physically correct
What types of projects or industries can benefit the most from using Cascadeur? It’s usefull for any project with 3D character animation, especially in gamedev. Animations can be prototyped much faster, and you can get the final result faster. This will benefit companies and freelancers alike. The program is also easier and more accessible to indie developers and hobbyists
Are there any upcoming features, enhancements, or integrations we can look forward to? We’re going to add more mocap tools. Ideally, motion recognition from video. We’re also working on supporting character interaction with the environment and other characters. We’re also recreating neuro-rendering, so that the user can get the end result as a picture or a video at once
What features make it so useful for 3D keyframe animation?
First of all, it is AutoPosing and AutoPhysics. This tools allow you to prototype animations much faster and get physically correct results. But Cascadeur also has many other useful things, such as trajectories and editing them, ghosts, twin-machine, IK/FK switching on the timeline, etc.
What kind of AI-assisted tools does it offer? This is AutoPosting tool. It trained on big dataset of poses. You move only few points of the character, and the rest of the body assumes a natural pose as far as possible. But you can set the position of any points you want
Could you share some examples of what it’s capable of achieving? You can check out our website or our YouTube channel (it’s not allowed to post links here) to see examples of animations created in Cascadeur
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