How Behaviours Work in Cavalry: A Complete Explanation

Behaviours are Cavalry's core innovation — they're reusable logic blocks that drive animation without manual keyframing.

What is a behaviour?
A behaviour is a small, self-contained animation instruction. Instead of keyframing "move this circle from X=0 to X=500 over 2 seconds," you connect a behaviour that says "oscillate between these values" or "follow this noise pattern" or "respond to this audio."

How to connect a behaviour:
1. Select a shape (e.g., Rectangle)
2. In the Attribute Editor, find the property you want to animate (e.g., Position X)
3. Right-click the property → Connect Behaviour
4. Choose from the list (e.g., Noise, Spring, Oscillator)
5. The behaviour appears in your Scene and automatically drives that property

Most useful beginner behaviours:

Noise — Organic, random movement (like AE's wiggle)
- Connect to Position for drifting
- Connect to Scale for breathing
- Connect to Rotation for gentle rocking

Oscillator — Rhythmic, predictable back-and-forth
- Like a sine wave — perfect for pulsing, bouncing, pendulums
- Control frequency, amplitude, and phase

Spring — Physics-based bounce
- Reacts to value changes with elastic overshoot
- Great for UI animations and playful motion

Value Remap — Maps one range to another
- Like AE's linear() expression
- Input range → Output range with easing options

Time — Continuous change over time
- Like AE's time expression
- Great for endless rotation, scrolling

Connecting behaviours to each other:
Behaviours can CHAIN together:
1. Noise behaviour outputs a value
2. Feed that into a Value Remap to constrain the range
3. Feed that into a shape's Position

This chaining is where Cavalry's power explodes — complex animation from simple building blocks.

One behaviour → many objects:
Connect one behaviour to a Duplicator property, and it affects ALL copies with variation based on each copy's index. One behaviour drives 1000 objects.

Pro tip: Think of behaviours like LEGO bricks for animation. Each one does something simple, but combining them creates complexity. Start with Noise (it's the most versatile), get comfortable connecting it to different properties, then branch out to Oscillator and Spring. Within a week, you'll be creating animations that would take 10x longer in AE.