Creating Animation in Harmony

When creating character rigs and animation for games, there are a few things to think about before you get started. Artists and programmers should work together to make sure their needs are met.

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What platform will your game be going on? Windows, Mac, Mobile, iOS, PS, XBOX, etc.

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What game engine will you be using?

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What is the style of the game? Hand drawn, cut-out, with textures, etc.

These are just a few of the questions you need to answer before getting started. They all have an impact on how you design, build, and animate your characters.

For example, if you’re planning a mobile game for smart phones, then you will most likely want to keep your game under 50 MB, so it can be downloaded without having to be on Wi-Fi. In that case, your most important consideration is to create efficient characters with very tight sprite sheets and reuse a lot of the animation to keep the file sizes small. During the process, you will need to:

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Rig and animate characters in Harmony

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Extract out the Harmony data

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Import the Harmony data into the game engine

This guide covers the entire process, including how to import the data into Unity. Keep in mind, if you’re working with a custom engine, you can also process the Harmony data that’s exported and use it in a custom game engine. If you need assistance with adapting data for your engine, please contact support@toonboom.com.

If you’re making a game for consoles, like the PS or XBOX, then you have the freedom to create larger textures. You may want to animate frame-by-frame, or you may want to animate with a cut-out character. You can feel free to follow the flow in this guide if you want to extract the Harmony data.

If you are simply going to export on a frame-by-frame sequence, then you can use all of Harmony’s tools without limitations. You can then process an exported image sequence into a sprite sheet. Harmony can easily support this process as well, though it will not be explained in this guide as there are no special guidelines required.