The Lab category covers my own personal experiments with Cavalry.
One of the first things that I wished to know in Cavalry was how to pull off a simple number counter. I couldn’t find a tutorial online, and so worked backwards from one of the demos, which are found under Create > Demo Scenes.
Let’s make a counter that starts at 0, goes up to a figure of 180, and then reverses back again.
Add a Text layer by holding Opt/Alt > Text tool. We will change the following: Alignment = Align Centre and Vertical Alignment = Align Middle.
Click on Text Shape > Shape > String > Generator > Value.
Now edit the new String layer attributes. Change Precision to 0, which removes the decimal point and the fractional digits. We want to set Padding to 3, which affects the prefixing digits (we want 000–192 and not 0–192).
Now you simply keyframe the String > Number property across your timeline. Note that you can apply easing to these frames, so for example, the count could begin and end more slowly.
By all means, experiment with Text Shape > Forced Monospacing / Alignment / Text Box Size to get the look that you want.
Here is my final animation, using Space Grotesk.
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The Cavalry Team have a number of reference videos waiting for you on their dedicated YouTube channel.
