Cascadeur — Local Physics & AI-Assisted Character Animation

Cascadeur is standalone character animation software built around physics and AI-assisted posing. Rather than generating motion from a prompt, it helps you keyframe faster and makes what you keyframe obey real-world weight and momentum.

It was launched in 2019 by Nekki, and one detail matters more than any feature: everything runs locally on your machine. No credits, no tokens, no cloud queue, no per-generation cost.

Why Local Matters More Than It Sounds

Most AI animation tools are cloud services that bill per generation. That changes how you work: every experiment has a price, so you think before you try something. Iteration becomes budgeted.

Cascadeur has no such meter. You can try a motion twenty times, throw all twenty away, and it costs nothing but your own compute. For animation — a craft that is fundamentally about iteration — that is a genuine workflow difference, not a marketing line.

One clarification, since it gets misreported: Cascadeur did not recently “remove” token billing. It has been local desktop software since 2019. The contrast is with cloud competitors, not with its own past.

The Core Tools

• AutoPosing — set a handful of control points and it infers a full, natural body pose from them.
• AutoPhysics — adjusts your animation so the centre of mass and trajectories behave physically, which is what kills the “floating” look in hand-keyed motion.
• AI inbetweening — fills frames between your key poses.
• Physics-based tools — ballistic trajectories, weight and contact handling.
• Retargeting — move animation between rigs (Pro tier).

What Is New in 2026.2

Released in August 2026, this update adds an animation layer system and easing controls for interpolation, updates AI inbetweening and motion generation, and adds BVH animation import.

Animation layers are the headline for working animators — non-destructive adjustment on top of existing motion is standard practice in Maya, and its absence was a real gap.

Pricing, and the Free Tier Catch

Cascadeur is not free for commercial work, and the free tier has one restriction that decides everything: it only exports to the proprietary .casc format. No FBX, no DAE — which means you cannot get your animation into Blender, Maya, Unity or Unreal.

The free edition is genuinely useful for learning the tools and for non-commercial projects. It is not usable in a production pipeline.

• Free — non-commercial, .casc export only
• Indie — around $19/month or $96/year, for revenue under $100k, with full export
• Pro — around $49/month or $396/year, adding retargeting and unlimited commercial use

The unusual part: yearly Indie and Pro licences are rent-to-own. After one year of subscription you keep a perpetual licence for the versions released during that period, even if you cancel. That is rare in creative software and materially changes the value calculation against a pure subscription.

Who It Is For

Animators working on action — fights, parkour, stunts, creature motion — where physical plausibility is the hard part and reference footage is impractical or dangerous to capture.

It is not a mocap tool and not a text-to-motion generator. If you want to capture a specific performance, see our motion capture comparison. Cascadeur is for motion you have to invent.

Developer: Nekki · Latest version: 2026.2 · Free tier: non-commercial, .casc export only

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Compare against capture-based approaches in our motion capture guide, and see whether Mixamo is still worth using.