The procedural engine is now something you can use with your hands
Cadence's procedural VFX engine — 354 node types, fields, simulation, materials, renderers — has had no canvas since it shipped. You could reach all of it through Claude and none of it by hand. That is fixed.
Press Nodes in VFX Studio, or Open the node graph in the inspector.
- Every node is in the palette. Search-first, because a nested menu over 354 types is a worse tool than a text box. Type swirl and Curl Noise comes up; bounce finds the collider work.
- Sockets are typed and coloured, and light up while you drag a wire to show what will accept it — green for a direct connection, amber where a conversion happens.
- Controls are generated from each node's own metadata — a dropdown for an enumeration, a slider only where there is a real bounded range, a colour swatch, a curve or gradient editor. Ranges, units and descriptions come from the node, so they are right by construction rather than by transcription.
- Live previews on the nodes that have something to show — noise fields, gradients, curves.
- Node groups open. Enter one, edit what is inside, come back out. Nothing is a black box.
One graph, not two
Claude edits the same graph through the same model. An effect it builds opens as the actual nodes that produced it, and a change you make by hand is one it reads back immediately — no import step, no separate AI format, no privileged path. The add palette and Claude's node catalogue are served from one registry, so there is no capability reachable only by asking.
Three acceptance tests run on every build: a human edit and a Claude edit alternating on one graph with exact agreement at each step; the graph surviving save and reload identically through the real on-disk format; and the two catalogues being the same list.
Also in this release
- A brand-new procedural effect no longer greets you with "1 warning." Frame 0 of a particle graph legitimately has nothing in it yet — that is now an explanation ("particles have not been emitted yet — scrub forward") rather than a warning about a graph that is working fine.
- The starter graph is laid out to be read, and the layout is checked against the real rendered boxes rather than against a diagram.
Verified
72 in-app integration checks and 224 engine tests pass. The editor was also checked against this packaged build rather than only the dev tree: 10 starter nodes, 58 typed sockets across 15 type colours, 44 inline controls, nothing truncated, 27 elements drawn at frame 24.
Installer: Cadence-Animator-Setup-0.10.0.exe — SHA-256 6bf8b24c8274771ab3c5c5101fb894320fce9186b10d4934cee3553b70527e87
Portable: Cadence-Animator-0.10.0.exe — SHA-256 d0c347ecbdf97e6d0be817cf12a6dbefde337fa686e72e8d21063b8a85af8b91
Windows x64. Unsigned, so SmartScreen will warn on first run — the checksums above are how you verify what you downloaded.