Toon Boom Harmony v12 Works with Unity and OFX Plug-ins |
2D animation package Toon Boom Harmony, now released in version 12, combines drawing and animation tools with automation and various workflow options. The traditional and digital tools for sketching, drawing and painting are built to apply classic principles of animation to characters and scenes, supported by modern tools that speed up production. It is now compatible with the Unity game engine, integrates 2D and 3D animation styles more easily, including lighting, and supports OpenFX plug-ins to increase its range of special effects. The software can be used to create complete projects in one application. |
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To develop looks and add detail, Harmony includes special effects. Now, v12 supports OpenFX so that OFX plugins can be accessed to add striking effects to characters and scenes. Harmony also has a customisable particle system built-in, for smoke, fire and weather effects, using objects that you create as sprites. Collada and Alembic format 3D files are supported and will load into Harmony. |
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Harmony v12’s deformers support high quality poses and transition animations and the deformer setup is now more straightforward. Bone deformers help rig characters very quickly for simple animatons. The new Game Bone deformers allow quick creation of character rigs designed specifically for compatibility with Unity. Improvements in how Curve deformers influence nearby artwork helps create facial rigs, for example, that allow cheeks to bulge with fine control over how edges of characters appear in profile. |
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Harmony’s many drawing tools allow quite a lot of artistic control over brush roundness and angle. Brushes may be used alone or with the vector drawing tools, and artists can now create customized bitmap brushes as textures for experimental and organic assets and drawing. The new dual brush creates new types of custom brushes by mixing two shapes or textures for different fuzzy or water colour lines. Randomise brushes for organic textured strokes, then save them all as custom brush presets. |
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Harmony 12 adds surface volume and lighting to 2D objects using automatic tones and highlights for characters that are more efficient than drawing the shading by hand frame-by-frame, or building lighting rigs. Once you have shaped the surface with regions, you can choose different coloured light sources, which may be animated, to add subtle highlights and create puffy shapes. |
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The application is available in three editions, to purchase or through a subscription model. Harmony Advanced is a professional grade software for studios and freelancers who need a full set of paperless and simple cut-out animation tools. Harmony Premium handles more sophisticated cut-out style animation through complex character rigs, organic movement and special effects for all animation styles. Harmony Essentials for enthusiasts has the fundamental Harmony drawing, painting and animation tools for simpler projects. For studio production teams using the Advance and Premium versions, Harmony Server is a shared central asset and production database deployed in a data centre or in the cloud for production control, creating users and visualizing render queues. |
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Harmony has been used on productions such as ‘The Simpsons’, ‘SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of the Water’ and ‘The Congress’. Andrew Schoentag, Vice President of Digital and Post Production at Disney Television Animation said, “The improvements in speed for the interactive user controls and render will have a distinct impact on our pipeline. The expansion of supporting third-party plugins is a significant move for the software, and will change the way the industry views Harmony as a compositing tool.” www.toonboom.com |