Getting Started with Cavalry: Complete Beginner Guide

Welcome to Cavalry! The learning curve feels steep at first because it thinks differently from After Effects, but the core concepts are simpler than they appear.

Step 1: Download and Install
Go to cavalry.scenegroup.co → Download for free (the free tier is generous and sufficient for learning).

Step 2: Understanding the Interface
Cavalry has four main areas:
- Viewport (center): Your canvas — what you see is what you get
- Scene Panel (left): Your hierarchy of shapes and objects (like AE's layer panel)
- Attribute Editor (right): Properties of the selected object (like AE's effect controls)
- Timeline (bottom): For keyframes when you need them

Step 3: Core Concepts

1. Shapes — Everything starts with shapes (rectangles, ellipses, polygons, paths). Create them from the toolbar.

1. Behaviours — These are the magic of Cavalry. Instead of manually animating, you connect behaviours to properties:
2. - Right-click any property → Connect Behaviour → choose one
3. - Example: Connect a "Noise" behaviour to Position → instant organic movement

1. Connections — Properties and behaviours connect together visually. One behaviour can drive many objects.

1. Duplicator — Cavalry's superpower. It takes one shape and creates many copies with rules:
2. - Grid layout (10×10 grid of circles)
3. - Path layout (shapes along a curve)
4. - Circle layout (shapes arranged in a ring)
5. Each copy can have variations based on its index.

Your First Animation (5 minutes):
1. Create an Ellipse (toolbar → Ellipse)
2. In the Attribute Editor, find "Fill Color" → right-click → Connect Behaviour → Colour Encode
3. Create a Duplicator → drag your Ellipse into it
4. Set Duplicator to Grid layout, 10 columns, 10 rows
5. Connect a "Noise" behaviour to the Duplicator's offset or scale
6. Hit Play — 100 animated circles, procedurally generated!

Best learning resources:
1. Official tutorials (cavalry.scenegroup.co/learn) — excellent quality, start here
2. YouTube: Cavalry channel — regular technique breakdowns
3. Discord community — active, helpful, beginner-friendly
4. Built-in examples — File → Open Example Project (study these!)

Pro tip: The biggest mindset shift from AE: stop thinking about individual keyframes and start thinking about RULES. In Cavalry, you define behaviors and relationships — the animation emerges from the system. It's like the difference between drawing every frame of a flock of birds versus defining "each bird follows the one ahead and avoids getting too close." Once this clicks, Cavalry becomes incredibly fast and intuitive.