There seems to be some misconception that the software is responsible for the skillfulness of the animation. If it is, would it be possible to make animation this fluid in the latest version of Harmony ? Of course, but it still would've been nice if they actually used TVPaint instead of resorting to paper. It’s a mix of digital and hand-drawn, depending on the studio.' Pete and Alex: 'Toon Boom Harmony and good ol’-fashioned paper and pencil. 'What animation tools do you use to produce the animation?' In an interview with executive producer Pete Browngardt and supervising director Alex Kirwan, they were asked: (although some animators are working with pencil on paper for rough animation, which is then scanned into Harmony for clean-up and coloring). I have several friends who are working on these shorts and they told me they are using Toonboom Harmony for animation, clean-up, and coloring. Harmony's frame by frame is mainly vector based, so you don't get the same results with vector drawing as you do with raster drawings. To animate this you need to use keyframe animation with tweens to make the different parts of the rig move, however this is something I will learn next time.My guess is that despite being colored in Harmony, the actual animation was done in TVPaint.

Then after following those steps for each layer you end up with something like in the image below.

Can also show all manipulators to show all the rig.

Show Deformation button (Next to rigging tool).

Rename transformation (Next to button above).

Press Create new deformation chain (4th button from Hammer button).

File> Import> Images> Separate layers> Toon Boom Bitmap> Straight.

To make a deformation rig in Toon boom I followed the following steps and then applied them to each of the features/ layers for the Squid. The reason for this is because if you don’t do this Toon Boom will merge all the layers together into one layer rather than individual layers, making it harder to rig. Anyway the key for making the deformation rig in Toon boom is to make sure all the different features in the drawing such as Head, Eye, Body, Mouth & Tentacles are on separate layers in group folders. As you can see they are pretty similar except I went for a realistic/ cartoon style with my design. In yesterday’s lesson I learned how to use deformation rigging in characters/ creatures that are flexible or have not bones, for instance a squid! So the task yesterday was to create a squid drawing in Photoshop and then import it into Toon Boom to rig with deformation rigging.īelow is a reference image I used to draw my squid design in Photoshop.īelow is my Photoshop drawing I designed using the reference image above.

Toon boom harmony brush