A long time ago, I wrote about this animation software called Cascadeur. For those who don’t know, or don’t remember the article, Cascadeur is a physics-based animation software. Basically the idea is that the app uses real physics and full-body IK to animate the characters. I will be writing more about Cascadeur in the future, since it’s in Early Access stage right now (the version I tested in the past was an unfinished demo version).
Also, two or three weeks ago I wrote about something completely unrelated: making games on your phone using Godot. Keeping this in mind, and also keeping Cascadeur in mind, now here comes the question: “would you be interested in animating on your mobile phone?”
Late last week, Eugene Dyabin, founder of Cascadeur, posted a short animation of himself playing with an Alpha version of Cascadeur running on a mobile phone, and he was actually animating the character (either the UE4 robot, or a robot that looks like the UE4 robot) on the mobile phone.
https://twitter.com/EugeneDyabin/status/1519741967307087879
On one side, the idea of being able to animate “on the go” is very intriguing, because sometimes you may need to get some work done and you are not carrying your computer with you. On the other hand, personally I am not a big fan of big-screen phones (one of my phones is an iPhone mini, and mi Android phone has an even smaller screen), so I just don’t see myself getting a big-screen phone to use these kinds of apps.
Since smartphones got better and better, there’s been this conversation about phones replacing computers. In some situations, I can agree with that. A smartphone can be enough for you depending on the kind of work you do. However, in other cases I think a computer will always be the best option. Godot mobile is a good example. I couldn’t test it myself, but saw people testing it and they said it was better to plug a Bluetooth mouse and keyboard to use the app, and that somewhat defeats the purpose of a mobile app.
Either way, I am curious to see how the app works. From what I understand it’s still very early in development, so we may not see it in at least one year. Still, it’s something worth keeping your eye on.
