I had no idea then that this discovery would completely transform how I approach animation.

The First Encounter

Cascadeur is a standalone 3D software that lets you create keyframe animation, as well as clean up and edit any imported ones. Thanks to its AI-assisted and physics tools you can dramatically speed up the animation process and get high quality results.

Let me confess. The first time I saw Cascadeur in action, I was hooked. The workflow looked incredibly intuitive, almost as if it had been tailor-made for animators like me. At that point, Cascadeur was still in its beta phase, but I was so impressed by what I saw and curious to learn more that I immediately applied and was accepted into the beta program. Today, with Cascadeur fully launched, I’m thrilled to have received a 2-year indie license as a reward for my early participation.

Why Cascadeur Stands Out

After spending a significant amount of time exploring Cascadeur, I can say that it has redefined how simply and smoothly an animation can be created. The simplicity of the process is hard to miss! Here are some of the standout features that make Cascadeur a game-changer, not just for veterans like me, but also for aspiring animators:

1. Intuitive physics-based animation

Cascadeur brings physics-based animation into the mix, which makes creating realistic motion much easier. The software's AI-assisted tools predict natural movements, helping animators achieve lifelike results without needing to tweak every frame manually.

2. Auto-posing and auto-physics

Cascadeur’s auto-posing and auto-physics features are real time-savers. They allow you to set key poses, and Cascadeur takes care of the in-betweens, ensuring smooth transitions and consistent physics throughout the animation.

3. Ballistic curve

The ballistic curve feature is especially handy for animating projectiles. It lets you visualize an object’s trajectory, making sure your motion paths are both accurate and true to the laws of physics.

4. Fulcrum points

The fulcrum points feature is a huge help when animating complex movements. By defining pivot points, you can create more dynamic and natural animations, especially when characters or objects interact intricately with their environment.

5. Physics ghost

Physics Ghost is another innovative tool Cascadeur offers. It shows a visual representation of an object's previous positions, helping you refine the motion over time. This is particularly useful for fine-tuning animations to achieve the desired fluidity and realism.

6. Different rig control modes

Cascadeur offers multiple rig control modes, providing the flexibility to animate characters with precision. Some of my favorites are:

• Auto Posing Mode: Automatically adjusts poses for natural movement.
• Point Controller Mode: Allows precise control over specific points on the rig.
• Box Controller Mode: Provides broader control over larger sections of the rig.
• Joint Mode: Offers detailed manipulation of individual joints for fine-tuned adjustments.

7. User-friendly interface

Cascadeur’s interface is incredibly intuitive, making it accessible for animators of all skill levels. While the learning curve is gentle, the software doesn't skimp on advanced features, striking a perfect balance between simplicity and power.

8. Rigging made easy

Rigging, which can often be a tedious process, is streamlined in Cascadeur. The software provides powerful rigging tools that allow for quick and efficient setup, freeing you up to focus more on the creative aspects of animation.

9. Real-time feedback

Real-time feedback is essential for animators, and Cascadeur excels here. The software offers real-time previews, ensuring you always know how your animation is coming together, saving you valuable time in the process.

Encouraging New Animators

Tools which can cater to all levels of experience are usually good. For those just starting out in animation, Cascadeur is a breath of fresh air, and I say this from my own experience during the Beta phase. Its user-friendly design and powerful features make it an excellent choice for beginners. At the same time, its advanced capabilities ensure it remains a valuable tool as amateur animators grow in their expertise.

Looking back on my journey with Cascadeur, I'm continually amazed by how it simplifies the animation process without compromising on quality. For experienced animators like myself, it offers a refreshing change from traditional tools. For newcomers, it provides an accessible and powerful platform to kickstart their animation careers.

It has undoubtedly earned a permanent spot in my animation toolkit, and I’m excited to see how it will continue to evolve and inspire the animation community.

Logic Simplified

Logic Simplified is a leading game design and development company with 12+ years of experience in creating top-notch games. We have assisted over 100 businesses globally, with our expertise in gaming and emerging technology solutions. Not just game app developers but our game animators too are sought-after, thanks to their expertise in creating stunning 2D and 3D animations. We do everything within the umbrella of our scalable design philosophy, competitive cost and flexible engagement models.

Write to us at enquiry@logicsimplified.com  or get in touch with us for a free consultation.

Spine is a 2D skeletal animation tool for game development and other animation projects. How does it work? Imagine each character with a series of single 2D images making up its various body parts. These images are posed around each other, and on top of an invisible, virtual skeleton consisting of a hierarchy of interconnected bones. So the character’s body parts are connected through “bones”. Through animation tools and code, each of the parts can be moved independently and the character animated. 

How Our Spine Animation Story Began

Behind every animation created is a story, often not told, and always involving a coming together of various skills. In this particular one, you will read about two things. One, how Spine works as a great 2D animation software.  And two, how our character artist, Manish, and animator, Abhishek, journeyed through the process of making the stunning animation.

At Logic Simplified, the creative minds seldom sit still. What do they do with some time on their hands? They create! Manish came up with this character art on one such day - with its unique personality and aesthetic. A horned beast with a tail, a bow, a quiver full of arrows, poised on semi-hoofed feet, waiting to be animated and brought to life.  

It’s almost as if Manish heard him.
 
Manish walked up to Abhishek, character in hand, and asked him to animate his creation. Abhishek, deft in using Spine animation software, got down to work. But before that, unlike usual tales which have a twist in the end, this one had a few right from the get-go.

The Challenges

An already ready image

 
We had a character image ready with us, but was it Spine-ready? No.

1. Creating a Spine-ready image is slightly different from creating the same for traditional animation. The image can be drawn as you normally would, as a single image, but to animate it in Spine it needs to be cut into several different animatable pieces.
2. For a dynamic animation it helps if the character is simpler and hence easier to turn and animate. For instance, having less fabric attached to its body for less follow-through animation. Ours was clad just enough, and on top of that, we had replaced the otherwise-stationary horns with thick, flowy locks of hair, in our attempt to ‘humanize’ the beast. 
3. Drawing a Spine-friendly character means you also need to draw parts of images that are normally obscured, as the visibility can change as the sprite moves. 
4. A side pose is easier to animate. 

The feet

 
The feet deserve a special mention. Who would have thought standing on tip-toes would be problematic? The pose in the original art was such that it needed to be changed in order to make things doable for the animator. 

Manish had made him stand. Abhishek had to reinvent the pose to what can be called ‘resting but still ready for action’ (if you hire game designers from us, this is how you will find them during lunch hour.) 

The tail had to be dropped, and also a part of the limb. Meanwhile, the feet, if you notice, remained perfectly unchanged. 
 

The Process 

Before Abhishek could begin working on animating Manish’s art, a lot of consultation and discussions ensued. The new character was a change from the older one, and while an artist’s heart is sensitive to such changes in the original, the idea of teamwork and delivering a great animation took precedence. 

This is what the process looked like henceforth: 

1. Abhishek took the character image from Manish in parts. Overlap of images is complicated, hence this anatomical dissection and cutting up of the image into clean parts. 
2. Each image part was converted to mesh. The USP of Spine animation software is how smoothly it converts an image part to mesh. 
3. In each mesh vertices are placed to define how we want to move the character. It is these vertices which can be moved. 
4. Abhishek confesses that the next phase was the most intense. This is when the underlying armature is defined. Bones are created to help the mesh move and provide fine-tuned control. At the very base of the skeleton is the root node, and all bones are parented to it, ultimately. Creating and naming bones is very user-friendly in Spine, as compared to other tools like Unity 2D. Rigging was then done for connecting mesh to bones and creating a skeletal frame.
5. Next, images were attached to bones, another process made easy with Spine. From the images section you can simply drag the appropriate image onto the bone. The image can then be selected to transform, rotate, and resize in order to match the underlying bone.
6. The Inverse Kinematics feature, a constraint feature quite like a parent-child relationship in reverse order, used to pose the animations, was used on the character’s feet. 
7. The animation is composed of a set of “key” frames. Snapshots of location, rotation and scale of a given bone are taken. Then the timeline was advanced to a different value, and the process repeated. The computer then interpolated between the key frames to create a smooth animation.  

In the Background - Artist v/s Animator

Animation is as much about character as it is about background, because there is a narrative to be created. Our character needed a fitting background too, and this is where the 2D game artist and the animator agreed to disagree, for just a bit. 

The character was a half-beast mythical warrior, oozing a sense of power, pride and purpose. Abhishek envisaged a background which showed some kind of conflict, like a war scene. Manish, on the other hand, wanted a forest as the background. An autumnal forest was chosen as the final background, and it works wonderfully! 

The scene becomes a study in contrasts - between conflict and peace, action and rest. The smoothness of animation adds a lulling, relaxing aspect, significantly portrayed through the animation of the hair and the leaves, the gentle wind and the mellow light. The overall effect makes you think - Is he resting or guarding? Is he about to charge ahead or is peering ahead with curiosity? 

Our game app developers could hardly wait to adopt him!

Reasons Why Animators Prefer Spine Animation 

Idle animations are made by not-so-idle experts, as you have seen above. It involves bending, deforming, skinning, timing, visualizing, posing and even constraining. Here are some key features of Spine 2D animation software that stand out:  

1. Meshes - Instead of drawing rectangles, meshes help you specify a polygon inside your image. This improves the fill rate because pixels outside the polygon won't be drawn. This is an important aspect for mobile games.  
2. Dopesheet and simple VCR style controls - Dopesheet is crucial for animating. It carries details of all the timelines that make up an animation and helps make minute adjustments to the timing of the 2D animation.
3. Simple UI - Unlike traditional animation softwares, SPine has easy-to-access tools and a clutter-free UI, making it smooth, light and efficient to work on.
4. Inverse Kinematics - Constraints at the feet defined the animation using inverse kinematics (IK).
5. Free-Form Deformation (FFD) - This feature allows you to move individual mesh vertices to deform the image. It helped stretch, bend and squash meshes in ways that aren't possible using rectangular images. This is a one up on Unity, which doesn’t support the free form deformation. So you can animate the bones, but not the mesh vertices.
6. Animation Reusability - Spine allows animators to reuse the same animation for an entirely new character with similar proportions. The same animation can also be modified, by adding props or new images during or after the animation is done.
7. Smoothness - All movement of bones is continuous. Notice the hair of the character. When an object is moving, Spine is adapting to movement all the time, hence the life-like effect.Bones can be manipulated through code, allowing for effects. 
8. Smaller size - Spine animations store only the bone data, hence their loading and rendering is stable and fast, even on mobile devices like Android or iOS. 
9. Export formats - Spine exports animation data in its own, documented JSON and binary formats which are light and hence ideal for game engines, as compared to old frame-by-frame sequence. 

Spine Animation with Logic Simplified

Spine Animation can be used both for creating 2D animations and for working with those animations in 2D games. 

Animators at Logic Simplified know Spine like the back of their hand, and are fully harnessing the potential this tool carries, not just for creating stunning animations but also for adding to the whole game development process. How so?

Our 2D game app developers value efficiency, flexibility and performance. In all three aspects, Spine Animation software works. Spine reduces overall development time, encourages multiple iterations and also optimizes animations for runtime efficiency, making it an excellent option for game development where smooth performance is a key goal. Spine integration libraries support most game engines including GameMaker Studio, Cocos2Dx, Unity, XNA, Flash, HTML 5, Corona, and more.

Logic Simplified is a leading game design and development company with 12+ years of experience in creating top-notch games. We have assisted over 100 businesses globally, with our expertise in gaming and emerging technology solutions. We are also a sought after Unity game development company. We leverage the latest tools and technologies, and combine them with our scalable design philosophy, competitive cost and flexible engagement models. Get in touch with us and share your project ideas.