Cascadeur

Creating fluid, physically believable character animation is a demanding craft that often requires years of experience and countless hours of meticulous work. Cascadeur is a standalone 3D animation software designed to address this challenge head-on. It empowers you to create, edit, and refine keyframe animations with unprecedented speed and realism by integrating intelligent, physics-based AI tools directly into your workflow.

Key Features

Cascadeur bridges the gap between creative control and physical accuracy, allowing you to produce higher-quality animations in a fraction of the time.

• 🤖 AI-Powered AutoPosing Achieve natural, life-like poses in moments. Simply move a few key control points on your character, and the neural network-powered AutoPosing tool intelligently adjusts the rest of the body to create a balanced and realistic stance. This dramatically speeds up the posing process, including for complex areas like hands, with dedicated finger controllers.

• 🏃‍♂️ Intuitive AutoPhysics Infuse your animations with realistic physics without sacrificing your creative vision. The AutoPhysics tool analyzes your animation and suggests improvements for balance, momentum, and secondary motion, displaying them as a helpful "ghost" overlay. You retain full control, allowing you to blend these physical corrections seamlessly into your work to create truly dynamic and grounded movement.

• 🔧 Effortless Rigging & Retargeting Get your characters animation-ready in minutes. The Quick Rigging Tool allows you to create a complete, functional rig with a simple drag-and-drop process. For standard models from platforms like Unreal Engine, Metahuman, or Mixamo, rigging is a one-click process. You can then transfer animations between any humanoid character, regardless of their proportions, with simple copy-paste retargeting.

• ✨ Intelligent Animation Unbaking Unlock the potential of existing animation data. Cascadeur can take "baked" animations—such as motion capture data where every frame is a keyframe—and intelligently convert them into an editable format. It automatically identifies the most important keyframes, making dense, unworkable data clean, light, and ready for you to refine.

How Cascadeur Solves Your Problems:

Cascadeur is built to solve practical, everyday animation challenges with powerful, focused tools.

1. Create High-Quality Game Animations, Faster You're an indie developer who needs a full set of combat animations for your game's hero. Instead of spending weeks on a graph editor, you use AutoPosing to quickly block out the key poses for a complex attack combo. With a click, AutoPhysics ensures the character's weight shift and momentum are believable. You then use the secondary motion sliders to add realistic follow-through on the character's cape. The result is a dynamic, production-ready animation set created in a fraction of the time of traditional methods.

2. Clean Up and Enhance Motion Capture Data As a VFX artist, you've received raw motion capture data that's jittery and locked. You import it into Cascadeur and use the Animation Unbaking tool to instantly generate clean, editable keyframes. From there, you refine the actor's performance, correct foot-sliding, and use AutoPhysics to ensure the character is perfectly grounded in the scene's environment. You've successfully salvaged and elevated the mocap data, saving valuable production time.

Unique Advantages

• A Physics-Informed Workflow: Cascadeur's core philosophy is built around physics. This makes achieving accurate body mechanics far more intuitive because you're guided by real-world principles of motion and balance, rather than relying solely on "eyeballing" it. This approach significantly lowers the learning curve for new animators.

• A Focus on the Viewport: Much of your work can be done directly in the 3D viewport. By minimizing the need to constantly jump back and forth to a complex graph editor, Cascadeur provides a more fluid, focused, and approachable animation experience.

Conclusion:

Cascadeur is more than just an animation tool; it's a new way to work. By blending your creative control with powerful AI and physics assistance, it removes much of the technical friction from the animation process. It allows you to focus on what truly matters: creating expressive, dynamic, and believable character performances.

Whether you're an indie game developer, a seasoned VFX professional, or just starting your journey in 3D animation, Cascadeur provides the tools to bring your characters to life with remarkable efficiency and quality.

Explore how Cascadeur can streamline your animation workflow!