I was inspired by OpenAI – Refreshed, when deciding on my next tutorial. This video was made by Studio Dumbar and it is a great piece of animation work. From conversation with my peers, I know that Studio Dumbar is big fan of Cavalry. I’m pretty sure they used Cavalry, when creating OpenAI piece 🙂

What I love about this set up is the precision of it. By using Math, we can precisely distribute shapes on a circle, while maintaining perfect spacing, gaps and overall geometric look and feel.

I would recommend reading up on JS Math on Cavalry’s Doc Page. If you want to create procedural systems, you need to rely on Math. And with JS Math, we can easily put together various calculations on 1 single node.

This one node makes things easier, as we don’t have to chain multiple Math nodes to get the same result of operations. Less layers, easier to manage more complex projects.

Next important thing to get yourself familiar with is Index Context. Cavalry relies heavily on Indexes in Arrays, Duplicators, even Text Layers. By harnessing the power of the Index, we can easily set up procedural rigs that will respond to various parameters we set up.

One thing to keep in mind – Indexes start at 0. If you are doing to do any calculations and use Index Context, you have to account for it. You can simply add +1 to Index Context value in most cases. Otherwise, “meshes can go missing” as you can see in my tutorial 🙂