Why Cavalry Is the Houdini of 2D (And Why After Effects Artists Should Care)

If you've spent any amount of time in the motion design world, you've probably heard whispers about Cavalry. Maybe a colleague mentioned it on Slack, or you've seen procedural animations in your feed with that familiar "made in Cavalry" tag. But most After Effects artists still are not sure what Cavalry actually is, or why they would want to learn it.

Here is the key idea: Cavalry is not here to replace After Effects. It changes how you think about 2D animation. Once you understand what it can do, you start approaching problems differently.

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What Is Cavalry, and Why the "Houdini of 2D" Comparison?

Cavalry is a 2D animation application built around procedural workflows. In the same way Houdini lets artists build systems instead of animating everything manually, Cavalry brings that approach to 2D motion design.

In After Effects, animating 50 circles in sequence usually means keyframes, expressions, or a complex setup. In Cavalry, you place those shapes in a Duplicator, add a Stagger behavior, and the animation is ready. You can preview everything in real time and iterate instantly.

As Greg Stewart, instructor for School of Motion's Cavalry Kickstart course, puts it:

"Cavalry is a tool that, from the ground up, has been designed to be used for animation. It's really fast with animating things and working with large quantities of shapes."

The main difference is in mindset. After Effects is layer-based, while Cavalry is built around relationships and systems. Instead of animating individual elements, you define rules and let the system handle the animation.

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The Duplicator: Where Cavalry Brain Begins

The Duplicator is the feature that defines Cavalry. Learning it is what Greg refers to as developing "Cavalry Brain."

A Duplicator takes a shape and creates copies based on rules you define. You can distribute shapes in grids, lines, paths, or even across complex SVG structures.

In one example from Cavalry Kickstart, Greg imports an SVG map made of many small squares. Animating each square manually in After Effects would require layers, pre-comps, and expressions.

In Cavalry, he sets the Duplicator to Sub Mesh distribution, and every square becomes a controllable element. By adding a Stagger behavior and a control Null, the animation spreads across the map based on the Null's position.

Move the Null, and the animation updates instantly. Everything happens in real time with only a few layers.

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Iterating at Scale: The Poster Generator Example

One of the most compelling use cases for Cavalry is generating variations, lots of them, from a single setup. In Cavalry Kickstart, Greg builds a Bauhaus-style poster generator that demonstrates this perfectly.

The concept is simple: create a grid of shapes inspired by Bauhaus design (circles, half-circles, triangles, quarter arcs, radial patterns), then build a system where you can randomize which shapes appear where, what colors they use, how they are rotated, and where the title sits. All of this is controlled by seed values you can adjust.

Here is how it works in practice: You create your "puzzle pieces," the individual shapes that make up the design. These go into a Duplicator as input shapes. Then you connect Random behaviors to control which shape appears in each grid position, what rotation it has, and what color it receives from your palette.

The real power comes from how these Random behaviors interact with seed values. Change the global seed, and you get an entirely new poster. But you can also use separate seeds for different properties. Want to keep the shape layout but try different color combinations? Change only the color seed. Happy with the colors but want to explore different rotations? Adjust just the rotation seed.

"There's really almost no limit to the levels of randomization that you can add. But I hope you've also been able to see a pretty decent amount of ability to control some of that randomization so that we can get pretty fine-tuned results, even though we are using a bunch of random behaviors to generate things for us."

In After Effects, building a system like this would require extensive expression work, and iterating through variations would mean manually adjusting values and waiting for previews. In Cavalry, you can scrub through seed values in real time and watch hundreds of unique posters generate instantly.

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Text Versioning That Actually Makes Sense

Text versioning is a common production challenge. Creating multiple lower thirds or titles in After Effects often involves duplicating comps or building templates.

Cavalry approaches this differently.

In the Cavalry Kickstart course, Greg builds a DVD chapter menu system for a documentary. The challenge: the documentary is still in production, so no one knows exactly how many chapters there will be. The system needs to be flexible enough to handle 3 chapters or 13 chapters, and simple enough that someone unfamiliar with Cavalry could update it.

His solution uses a Formatted String Generator combined with a String Array. Here's the thinking:

Every chapter title follows the same format: "CHAPTER 1: System of a Crash" or "CHAPTER 2: The Setup." The word "CHAPTER" never changes. The number should auto-increment. Only the chapter name needs manual input.

So Greg creates a Formatted String Generator where he types the static text ("CHAPTER") and uses curly brackets to reference dynamic values: the chapter number (pulled automatically from the duplicator's index) and the chapter name (pulled from a String Array where someone just types the names).

The String Array connects to the Duplicator's count, so adding a new chapter name automatically creates a new duplicate. The Index Context utility auto-generates the chapter numbers. Someone updating this project doesn't need to understand how any of it works; they just add names to a list, and the system handles everything else.

"Really, what I want is for someone to just type in the name of the chapter. I think that's the most thoughtful way we could set this up. So if we have to hand it off to somebody else, it'll be really easy for them to edit."

This kind of thinking, building systems that are robust for editors and flexible for changes, is natural in Cavalry. The node-based architecture encourages it.

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How Cavalry Integrates with Your After Effects Workflow

You don't have to abandon After Effects to use Cavalry. In fact, Cavalry is designed to complement your existing workflow, not replace it.

Cavalry excels at procedural animation and working with large quantities of shapes. After Effects excels at compositing, working with third-party plugins, and integrating with the broader Adobe ecosystem. The smart approach is to use each tool for what it does best.

Design in Illustrator or Figma → Animate in Cavalry → Composite in After Effects

Greg shares a real production example where he built animated brush strokes in Cavalry for a larger After Effects project. The workflow looked like this:

Compositors working in After Effects would draw shape layers to define paths where they wanted brush stroke animations. They'd use Overlord to export those paths to an Illustrator file. Greg would copy those paths into Cavalry as a single SVG, apply a "Contours to Sub Meshes" behavior, and set up his animated brush system. However many paths the compositors gave him, 5 or 50, Cavalry would automatically output that exact number of animated brush assets.

"When they bring them into After Effects, they're essentially already placed because the render size that I'm doing out of Cavalry is the same as the composition that they're working in. So it just makes it really, really easy for me to essentially just, with a couple clicks, generate a bunch of animated brush assets for any compositor on the team."

The handoff is seamless. Render ProRes with alpha from Cavalry, drop it into After Effects, and your procedural animation sits alongside all your other elements ready for color grading, effects, and final polish.

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Rendering That Actually Respects Your Time

Cavalry is fast. Because it uses vector-based calculations, playback is real-time by default.

One of its most powerful features is Dynamic Rendering, which allows you to export multiple variations automatically.

For example:

• Generate 100 posters from one setup
• Create multiple social variations for testing
• Export large batches of templated content

Another Pro tip: keyframe your seed value from 0 to 99 across 100 frames, then export a PNG sequence. Each frame is a different variation. Pick the ones you like, or use all of them.

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What Cavalry Enables That After Effects Can't (Easily) Do

You can do most things in After Effects with enough expressions and rigs. But "can do" and "should do" are different questions.

Index Context: Every duplicate knows its index, its position in the sequence. Use that index to drive color, scale, rotation, and time offset. No expressions required, just drag connections.

Sub-Mesh Deformers: Import an SVG with multiple shapes, and Cavalry can animate each independently. It's like per-character text animation—for any vector artwork.

Behaviors That Stack: In After Effects, combining multiple procedural effects means complex expressions. In Cavalry, behaviors stack naturally. Add Noise for organic movement, Travel for direction, and Stagger for time offsets. They combine automatically.

Node-Based Logic Without Code: Open the Dependency Graph to see exactly how connections work. Build conditional logic shapes that appear only within certain boundaries, properties that respond to other properties without code.

Native Data Visualization: Connect spreadsheets or JSON files to drive animation directly. Build charts that update when data changes. For data-driven work, this alone might justify learning Cavalry.

Developing Your "Cavalry Brain"

The biggest hurdle for After Effects artists isn't the interface; it's the mindset shift. Greg emphasizes this:

"Because in some ways it looks kind of similar, it can be a little confusing if you're coming from After Effects because you have certain expectations of what it is and isn't gonna do."

In After Effects, you think in layers and keyframes. In Cavalry, you think in systems and relationships. Instead of asking "how do I animate this shape," you ask "what rules govern how these shapes should behave?"

This is harder at first. You'll reach for familiar approaches and find they don't quite fit. But then that system scales to 500 shapes with no additional work, and you start to understand.

The payoff comes when you realize you're solving animation problems in minutes that used to take hours, and the solutions are more flexible and more impressive than what you could have built manually.

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Quick Takeaways

• Cavalry is a procedural 2D animation a complement to After Effects, not a replacement
• Duplicators are the core feature that distribute and animate hundreds of shapes with behaviors, not keyframes
• Random seeds control variations generate endless iterations from a single setup
• Text versioning is built in. String Arrays make bulk updates painless
• It integrates with After Effects render with alpha and composite in AE
• Render times are dramatically faster with real-time playback as the default
• Learning requires a mindset shift from layers to systems, but the payoff is enormous

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Ready to Saddle Up?

If you're curious about Cavalry, the free version is surprisingly capable of exploring the interface, building with Duplicators, and starting to develop your Cavalry Brain without spending a dime. It's a legitimate tool, not a crippled demo.

For structured guidance from someone who's used Cavalry on real production work, from animated brush strokes to procedural poster generators to automated menu systems, School of Motion's Cavalry Kickstart course walks you through everything from first steps to advanced systems. You'll build actual projects, develop that procedural mindset, and come out with a new tool that might just change how you approach every project.

Cavalry isn't coming to replace After Effects. It's here to make you faster, more creative, and capable of things that used to be impractical.

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FAQs

Is Cavalry free? Yes! It's free for individuals, and not in a watered-down way. It includes professional features like procedural rigs, real-time viewport, and data-driven sequences, with no restrictions or payment needed for Individuals, even for commercial use. However, studios/organizations will still need a paid Canva account (Canva Enterprise or Canva Education) to use it. Download at cavalry.scenegroup.co.

Do I need coding skills? Not at all. Most procedural work uses built-in behaviors and utilities, no code required. JS math nodes exist for advanced users, but they're optional.

Can Cavalry replace After Effects? For most motion designers, no, and that's by design. Cavalry excels at procedural animation; After Effects excels at compositing with a larger plugin ecosystem. Use both.

How steep is the learning curve? The interface feels familiar, but procedural thinking takes time. Most AE artists feel comfortable within a few weeks, with "Cavalry Brain" clicking after completing a few real projects.

What file formats does Cavalry support? Import: SVGs, images, video, audio, and ASE color palettes. Export: image sequences, QuickTime (including ProRes 4444 with alpha), and scene packages for the Cavalry Player.

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Take Your Skills Further with Cavalry Kickstart

Ready to develop your "Cavalry Brain"? Check out Cavalry Kickstart, available with School of Motion All-Access. Learn to build procedural systems, master the Duplicator, and create animations that would take hours in After Effects in minutes.