Drawing with Bitmap Brushes
With Harmony, you have the choice to draw with vector or bitmap brushes. When adding a new drawing layer in Harmony Stage, Harmony Sketch or Harmony Draw, you can set your art layers (Line, Art, Colour Art) to vector or bitmap. This way, you can draw in bitmap and paint in vector, draw everything in bitmap, or whatever other combination suits you.
Not all drawing tools are available when working on a bitmap layer. You can use the following tools:
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Reposition All Drawings |
If you selected the incorrect art mode for your layers, you can open the Layer Properties view and modify them there directly. If you switch the art mode for a layer that already has strokes on it, the artwork will NOT be converted. You will be able to add new strokes. A drawing with bitmap strokes will be converted to a vector layer but the bitmap artwork will remain as bitmap. You will be able to use vector drawing tools to continue drawing on it. A drawing with vector lines switched to a bitmap layer will allow you to draw new bitmap strokes and move the vector strokes with the Select tool, but you will not be able to edit the vector art further. You need to convert the drawings in order to pass the artwork from one mode to the other.
To always reuse the same art mode settings, you can adjust them in the Preferences dialog box.
Before you start drawing in bitmap, it is important to understand that your artwork will now be resolution dependent. If you zoom in your scene, you artwork will be enlarged. It is important to plan ahead and decide how high of a resolution you need your artwork to be. If you plan to zoom in your scene, the smallest section of the image that the camera will frame must be 100% the size of your scene resolution. For example, if your scene resolution is set to 1920 x 1080 and you zoom in at 300%, then the resolution of the bitmap also has to be set to 300%. It is important to change the bitmap layer resolution before you start drawing.
The bitmap resolution can be set at the scene level or drawing level. The setting at the scene level affects newly created bitmap art layers.
Note that even if your drawing resolution is set to be very large, it doesn't mean that your file will be very heavy. It depends on the amount of artwork your draw in it.
There is a function to change the resolution of bitmap art for individual drawings. You can reduce the resolution of your bitmap file as well as increase it. Be careful because enlarging the bitmap resolution on an existing drawing will result in a loss of quality.Harmony will perform a pixel smoothing pass (resampling) and create additional pixels to avoid losing too much quality, but only to a certain extent. For example, you used the default scene’s resolution for bitmap art but then discover you are zooming quite close into the lines. If you do not want to see the pixels appear too much when you are zoomed in, you can set the bitmap resolution to 200% and the bitmap art will have a higher resolution with smaller pixels, but will NOT retain 100% of its quality. You can use this function on multiple drawings using the Apply to All Drawings option. Changing this option will affect existing and selected bitmap art layers.
If you drew an outline drawing on a bitmap layer, you can vectorize your artwork. Using a vector drawing layer, you can simply select your bitmap drawing and the vector cell on which you want your new vector layer to be, and use the Vectorize Line Art in Selected Drawing function.
You should avoid scaling up your bitmap strokes using the Select tool. If you do, keep in mind that when you continue drawing, your image will be resampled and your new strokes will be at the original resolution and not the scaled up size.
Your drawing should be scaled up using the Transform
tool instead of the Select tool to avoid creating very large bitmap layers.
How to change the bitmap resolution at the drawing level
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1.
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In the Drawing Thumbnails panel, select a bitmap drawing. |
Note that the drawing can be enlarged slightly and retain its original look, but you may lose quality if you enlarge it too much. Pixels are created and a smoothing pass is applied. You should set your resolution before drawing. If you need to change the resolution of a drawing to be larger than the one set in the Scene Settings dialog box, create an empty drawing first and then follow this procedure.
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From the top menu, select Drawing > Change Bitmap Drawing Resolution. |
The Change Bitmap Drawing Resolution window opens.
Parameter
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Description
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Scene Resolution |
This is the scene resolution preset name and size in pixel. |
Width |
This is the width of the resolution for the bitmap that will be created. This is not the actual size of the bitmap. TVG drawings (Toon Boom drawing native format) have an infinite size. Bitmap TVGs are composed of small tiles. Therefore it does not mean that because you have artwork at the four corners of your camera frame or even quite far outside of your drawing that your bitmap image will be very large and heavy. By default, it is set to the same width as the scene resolution. |
Height |
This is the height of the resolution for the bitmap that will be created. By default, it is set to the same height as the scene resolution. |
Resolution Factor |
This is the size of the bitmap resolution in relation to the scene resolution. If you increase the percentage, the width and height fields will increase accordingly. If you plan to animate the camera and zoom into your background, you will need to set a higher resolution so that the smaller area in which you will zoom will be 100% of the scene resolution. |
Resample Bitmap |
When this option is selected, the existing bitmap image is modified to match the new resolution. If the width and height are increased, more pixels will be created to enlarge the image. Visually, the existing artwork will look the same, maybe a little bit smoothed out, but the size will look the same. When this option is deselected, the artwork is not modified. Only the reference grid is resized. If the scene resolution is 1920 x 1080 and you reduce the bitmap resolution to 960 x 540, the image will be scaled up to twice the size of the scene.
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Apply to All Drawings |
The modified settings are applied to all drawings in the drawing layer for a given art layer. If the Apply to Line Art and Colour Art option is enabled, it will then be applied to all bitmap art layers. |
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Change the bitmap resolution. |
How to draw with bitmap brushes
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1.
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In the Drawing Thumbnails panel, select a bitmap drawing. |
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2.
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In the Tools toolbar, select the Brush tool or press Alt + B. |
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3.
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In the Colour view, select a colour. |
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To switch the bitmap colour picker from HSV to RGB, in the Colour view menu, select Colour > Bitmap Colour Sliders > HSV Sliders or RGB Sliders. You can also right-click on the colour sliders and select RGB Sliders or HSV Sliders. |
When using bitmap colours, there is no longer a link between the painted zones and selected colour. You can modify the colour picker as much as you want. Your drawing will not be affected. You can still select colours from your vector colour palette to use the same tint, but you will not create links between your drawing and the swatches.
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4.
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In the Drawing view, start drawing. |