Heads up – this is not a tutorial, but a project overview. All the files you need are located on Gumroad store and Scenery as well.

Cavalry is 2D animation software, as of 2026, with 2.5D capabilities. We can enable 3D rotation and position of layers, add camera and few other things. But Duplicator still makes shapes on “1 plane”. With the help of ChatGPT, I came up with a setup that allows you to:

• Create points in 3D space
• Project it in a 2D view
• Scale them in Z-Depth space
• Push away smaller pieces in Z-Depth
• Rotate cards on their Normals rotation, like they would rotate in a 3D software (face angle they are pointing at)

It’s pretty complex system with lots of moving parts. But you can get quite a lot of interesting animations out of it.

Below, you can see what we are doing in Cavalry, with a simple example from a Blender. We are creating a sphere by project points in a “3D space”. Then, they are “translated” to a 2D view. This is kind of equivalent to “toComp” expression in After Effects.

I ended up creating 2 distinct distribution types. Fibonacci and Globe-like one. Fibonacci has a nice pattern that works like scales on a lizard. Cards are overlapping each other, while going around the surface.

Globe distribution works like an Earth Globe – you can control number of latitude and longitude copies to create a Globe-like structure.

Other controls are the same.

• Keep JS layer inputs naming as they are – they should be self explanatory
• Distribution JS layer is driving all the transformations across Scale, Z-Depth and Normals XY rotation
• Rendering images is a bit heavy – use smaller resolution, rather than for example, 4k files
• You don’t have to “stick” to a sphere – there are individual controllers for Radius in X, Y and Z directions – you can even make an egg shape 🙂
• Globe distribution copies work by multiplication
  • Latitude x Longitude = Total Number of Copies
  • For example, 10 lat x 15 long = 150 copies