Version 0.10.0 · Windows
Cadence is a standalone animation suite for Roblox — a proper 3D viewport with inverse kinematics and onion skinning, full Moon Animator 2 feature parity, a multi-layer VFX studio with a procedural node engine behind it, and two-way sync with Roblox Studio. Free and open source.
The animator
Cadence is not a docked plugin panel — it is a real application with a real viewport, resizable panels and its own window. Every feature below is in the shipping build.
Move, rotate, scale and trackball gizmos over a three.js scene. Rigs render the way
Studio renders them — part shapes, colours, meshes, UGC textures and
SurfaceAppearance faces, measured against Studio rather than approximated.
Drag a hand or a foot and the joints above it follow. A cyclic-coordinate-descent solver works on the rig's own motors, with a configurable chain length, and lands its result in the same auto-key and undo pipeline as manual posing.
press TSee where the pose came from and where it is going: ghosts of past frames in blue and future frames in orange, drawn from the same geometry as the live rig so they cost nothing extra to show.
A dope sheet for timing and a bezier curve editor for feel. Thirteen easing styles in four directions each, ported from Moon Animator's own engine and verified bit-exact — including the two quirks Moon has, kept on purpose so animations match.
13 styles × 4 directionsGroup keyframes so they move together, mirror a pose left-to-right, and fill, repeat, stretch, reverse or offset whole frame ranges. Box-select works correctly even while the timeline auto-scrolls under the drag.
Flag any track as unparented and its keys store world CFrames instead of parent-relative motor transforms — so copying that motion onto a rig with different proportions reproduces the same path through space, not a wobble.
Drop in an MP3, WAV or OGG and get a real waveform under the dope sheet, so a hit or a beat lands on the frame you can actually see.
There is no "save before you close". Every change is written to disk within a second, the last ten generations are kept as rolling backups, and reopening the app resumes the project you were in with no dialog to dismiss.
10 rolling backupsFour themes and six accent colours, every panel resizable with its size remembered, and a quality checker that sweeps an animation for rotation pops, dead joints, degenerate transforms and held-pose tails.
Roblox Studio
A small companion plugin bridges Cadence and Studio over a local HTTP connection on
127.0.0.1:35747. Cadence installs it for you.
CadenceBridge.lua into your Roblox plugins folder. Restart Studio, turn on
Allow HTTP Requests, and hit Connect on the new toolbar tab.
.rbxm /
.rbxmx file. R6, R15, Rthro and Rthro Slender are built in.
KeyframeSequence into
<rig>.AnimSaves.<name> — the same convention Roblox's own
Animation Editor uses, so it opens there ready to publish.
AnimSaves — so Moon exports come in too.
Dummy can never overwrite each other's animations.
Beyond joints
Cadence carries Moon Animator's animatable-property registry across in full: 67 Roblox classes' properties on a timeline, plus 22 one-shot actions you can fire on a frame. Events get markers with their own Luau, cameras get keyframed field of view, and four screen effects — vignette, letterbox, cover and subtitles — sit on the same timeline as everything else.
VFX Studio
Effects in Cadence are multi-layer documents, not one particle emitter with sliders. Every layer is keyframeable, every effect scrubs deterministically — frame 40 looks identical every time you land on it — and the whole thing exports as one self-contained Luau script.
Stack them, clip them, drive any property with a curve or an expression, then layer on eight modifiers — noise, wind, pulse, flicker, orbit, fade, gradient shift, glow boost.
Draw the effect instead of describing it. Paint five layers on one canvas — shape, colour, density, motion and energy — and Cadence composes roughly thirty complete, fully editable effects from low-level primitives. Not thirty presets picked off a shelf: each composition's layer graph is assembled fresh from what you painted.
A visual node editor is in early access alongside the layer inspector, with eight node types covering create, appearance, motion, physics, timing and output. For effects the layer model cannot express, the procedural engine below is a separate mode.
Procedural engine
A second way to author effects, next to the layer model rather than replacing it. Instead of choosing an effect and adjusting its properties, you compose one from primitives — maths, fields, noise, distance fields, geometry, particles, materials, renderers. The library accelerates that. It does not define what is possible.
354 node types across 27 categories. Every one documents its own units, ranges, common uses and exactly what Roblox does with it — and every one is in the editor's search palette and in Claude's catalogue, because they are the same list.
There is no “colour over lifetime” setting anywhere in the engine. You wire a particle's normalised age into a gradient, and into colour. The same three nodes give you size over lifetime, opacity over distance, or emission over speed — including the combinations nobody anticipated.
Forces are vector fields, so gravity is a constant direction and turbulence is curl noise. Colliders are distance fields, so one collider node handles a plane, a sphere, a capsule and anything you built by combining them. Emitters take any geometry, so particles can be born from a shape the engine has never seen.
You wire all of it on a canvas, with typed sockets that show you what will connect and live previews on the nodes that have something to show. Claude works on the same graph through the same model, so an effect it builds opens as the real nodes and an edit you make by hand is one it reads back — there is no separate AI version of anything.
Roblox decides what runs natively in Roblox. It does not decide what Cadence can author. So the exporter classifies every render pass and tells you which it is:
Colour gradients and size curves survive as real ColorSequences and NumberSequences where Roblox can take them. Motion it cannot reproduce — curl noise, collisions — is baked into a recording rather than quietly dropped or approximated into something else.
Stated here rather than discovered later. There is no fluid or pyro solver and no volumetric rendering, so genuinely simulated fire and raymarched clouds are out of reach — a stylised fire is not, and is what the engine is good at. Volume grids work as a cache for an expensive field, a 3D blur and a spawn region. Screen-space post-processing (bloom over the finished frame, motion blur, depth of field) needs a render target the preview does not have; the glow that exists works on a texture you built, and is named accordingly. Mesh editing — extrude, bevel, boolean — needs connectivity the geometry model does not carry. Procedural effects cannot yet be sent to the animator's timeline, which holds layer-based effects.
Where a capability is absent, the node for it is absent too — the type system refuses to register a node against a subsystem that does not exist, so there is no button that appears to work and does not.
MCP
Cadence ships a Model Context Protocol server with 135 tools — 74 for
the animator, 30 for VFX Studio, 31 for the procedural engine. Claude can add a rig, set
exact keyframes, solve IK,
run the quality checker and export to Studio. Crucially it can also
look: render_frame screenshots the viewport at any frame and hands
the image back, so it checks its own work instead of assuming.
render_frame returns a real image of the viewport at a given frame, and
get_pose returns exact world CFrames without disturbing what is on screen.
validate_animation flags rotation and position pops, joints that never
move, non-orthonormal transforms and a dead tail after the last keyframe.
Press Claude Control in the title bar and Cadence registers itself with the Claude CLI. Installing from npm registers it automatically.
Coming from Moon Animator 2
Moon Animator 2 is very good, and Cadence deliberately matches it — the same easing
engine, the same keybinds, the same animatable-property registry, the same
AnimSaves convention. What changes is where it runs and what it can reach.
| Moon Animator 2 | Cadence | |
|---|---|---|
| Runs as | A Studio plugin, docked in Studio | Its own desktop application |
| Easing engine | 13 styles × 4 directions | The same 13 × 4, ported bit-exact — quirks included |
| Keybinds | Its own ~50-binding set | The same set, matched deliberately |
| Property & action tracks | Yes | Yes — 67 classes, 22 actions |
| Inverse kinematics | — | CCD solver on the rig's own motors |
| Onion skinning | — | Past and future ghosts |
| World-space tracks | — | Any track, convertible without drift |
| VFX authoring | — | A separate multi-layer studio, exports Luau |
| Driven by an AI agent | — | 135 MCP tools, including screenshots back |
| Phone companion | — | View and scrub over a temporary tunnel |
| Marker Luau | Runs inside Studio | Authored and exported; runs in Studio after export |
| Live instance manipulation | Writes to Studio instances as you scrub | Authors and exports; Studio applies |
A dash means the feature is not present, not that it is bad. The last two rows are places where being a standalone app is a genuine trade-off rather than a win.
Download
Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit. No account, no licence key, no telemetry. Files are served from the project's GitHub release, which is the same place the in-app updater looks.
Installs to your user folder with Start-menu and desktop shortcuts, and lets you pick the location. This is the build that can update itself in place.
Download installerCadence-Animator-Setup-0.10.0.exe6bf8b24c8274771ab3c5c5101fb894320fce9186b10d4934cee3553b70527e87
One executable, nothing installed. Good for a locked-down machine or a USB stick — but there is nothing on disk for the updater to replace, so new versions are a manual re-download.
Download portableCadence-Animator-0.10.0.exed0c347ecbdf97e6d0be817cf12a6dbefde337fa686e72e8d21063b8a85af8b91
Clone it, or install straight from GitHub with npm — which also registers the MCP server with the Claude CLI for you.
npm install -g github:alycoulibal2-sketch/Cadence-Animator
cadence-animatorQuestions
AnimSaves folders
Moon and Roblox's Animation Editor use, and identifies rigs by a GUID attribute rather than
by name, so it cannot mix up two rigs that share a name. Exports go to a name you choose.A rig is two clicks away, and there is no project to set up first.