Drawings and Layers
A very important concept to understand in Harmony are drawings, drawing elements, and layers. A drawing element is a directory containing multiple drawings and is linked to a layer in the Timeline view. The layer
In traditional and paperless animation, a drawing element or layer can be a character, for example, level B. In cut-out animation, a drawing element can be the hand layer.
When you add a layer to your scene, a node and a folder (element folder) are also added. As explained above, the element folder's purpose is to contain all the drawings related to this column. For example, in cut-out animation, a character can have many mouths available. All these mouth drawings will be contained in this folder, even if they are not currently exposed in the scene. In other words, there is always a drawing container hooked to a layer, unless that layer is linked to another drawing element (clone).
You can find the drawing element folders in your scene's subdirectory called elements
.
You can add drawing layers from the Timeline view, and the top menu .
In order to understand what happens when you duplicate a drawing, extend an exposure, create cycles or delete a drawing, it is important to know how a layer works.
Each layer is linked to a
New vector drawings are created as *.tvg (Toon Boom Vector Graphic) files.
The layer’s cells are not used for storage, but are linked to the drawings contained in the layer’s directory. If you remove a drawing from the layer exposure, it is not deleted; it is simply not displayed.
When you create a drawing cycle, all of the repeated drawings are linked to the same original files. This means that when you modify, repaint or correct a drawing named “1”, all drawings named “1” are updated simultaneously. In order to modify a drawing independently from its other exposures, you must duplicate the drawing.