More Drawing Tools

Harmony offers a wide variety of useful tools to optimize your drawings and work more efficiently; tools such as Group, Arrange, and the animation disk to rotate your workspace.

Arrange
Convert Brush Strokes to Pencil Lines
Pencil Lines to Brush Strokes
Strokes to Pencil Lines
Optimize
Remove Extra Strokes
Reduce Drawing Texture Resolution
Crop Brush Textures
Grid
Group/Ungroup
Hand
Rotate View

Arrange

The different Arrange options let you reorder drawing objects inside a single layer in the Camera view.

Name Button Description Access Method
Bring to Front Moves the selected art to the front (on top)

From the top menu, select Drawing > Arrange > Bring to Front.

Press Ctrl + Shift + PgUp (Windows/Linux) or ⌘ + Shift + PgUp (Mac OS X).

Bring Forward Moves the selected art one level forward (closer to the front)

From the top menu, select Drawing > Arrange > Bring Forward.

Press Ctrl + PgUp (Windows/Linux) or ⌘ + PgUp (Mac OS X).

Send Backward Moves the selected art one level lower (behind)

From the top menu, select Drawing > Arrange > Send Backward.

Press Ctrl + PgDown (Windows/Linux) or ⌘ + PgDown (Mac OS X).

Send to Back

Moves the selected art behind everything (bottom / back)

 

From the top menu, select Drawing > Arrange > Send to Back.

Press Ctrl + Shift + PgDown (Windows/Linux) or ⌘ + Shift + PgDown (Mac OS X).

Convert Brush Strokes to Pencil Lines

The Brushes Strokes to Pencil Lines operation converts selected contour strokes into centreline pencil strokes. This command is only available from the top menu.

Pencil Lines to Brush Strokes

The Pencil Lines to Brush Strokes operation converts the selected centreline pencil strokes into contour strokes brush lines.

Strokes to Pencil Lines

The Strokes to Pencil Lines operation converts the selected invisible line to a pencil line.

Optimize

The Optimize command reduces the number of layers, such as overlapping brush strokes, in the selected drawing objects. Drawing objects will only be flattened and optimized if the selected objects do not change the appearance of the final image when they are merged.

For example, if you have selected a number of partially transparent objects, which you layered to create an additive colour effect, the selected transparent drawing objects will not be merged. This is because merging the transparent drawing objects will cause them to lose the effect of the layered transparent colours.

Remove Extra Strokes

The Remove Extra Strokes option let you remove the invisible lines in your selection.

Reduce Drawing Texture Resolution

If you import and vectorize as texture (colour) a high resolution image, the size of your drawing can be heavy. This option is used to reduce the size and resolution of the textures in your drawing. When you import and vectorize drawings using the grey or colour preset styles, you don't have control on the size of the bitmap texture. This tool allows you to reduce that bitmap texture.

Crop Brush Textures

Crop Drawing Texture

The Crop Brush Textures option is used to crop an unnecessarily large texture bitmap that lies unseen beneath the vector contour of a textured line. This often occurs when you cut and paste textured lines from one drawing into another. If you cut a portion from a textured line and paste it into a different drawing, Harmony pastes the entire unseen texture bitmap from the source drawing into the new one, even if you only took a small portion of the source drawing. Using the Crop Brush Texture command will crop away extraneous texture that does not touch the vector area. If there are many textured lines in your scene, this will greatly reduce the file size.

In the example shown above, a textured line is cut from a drawing and pasted into a new drawing. At first, it appears as if only a cropped section of the underlying texture bitmap was cut and pasted as well. However, using the Contour Editor tool to expand the vector envelope of the textured line, it is revealed that more texture bitmap exists beyond the cropped boundary. If you use the Crop Brush Texture command, the bitmap texture is cropped to the boundaries of the textured line’s vector contour (as seen in the fourth image where the vector envelope has been pulled out to reveal empty space).

Grid

Use the Show Grid option to display a grid in the Camera view.

Name Button Description Keyboard Shortcut

Show Grid

 

Displays the grid

From the top menu, select View > Grid > Show Grid

Press Ctrl + ' (Windows/Linux) or ⌘ + ' (Mac OS X).

Square Displays a standard square grid

From the top menu, select View > Grid > Square.

12 Field Grid Displays a 12-field size grid

From the top menu, select View > Grid > 12 Field Grid.

16 Field Grid Displays a 16-field size grid

From the top menu, select View > Grid > 16 Field Grid.

Underlay Displays the grid under the drawing elements From the top menu, select View > Grid > Underlay
Overlay Displays the grid over the drawing elements From the top menu, select View > Grid > Overlay

Group/Ungroup

Use the Group option to group selected drawing objects. This can help in the selection, repositioning, re-scaling and other transformations to be applied to multiple objects of a drawing.

From the Camera view menu, select Edit > Group > Group or Edit > Group > Ungroup.
Press Ctrl + G and Ctrl + Shift + G (Windows/Linux) or ⌘ + G and ⌘ + Shift + G (Mac OS X).

Hand

Use the Hand tool to pan through the Camera view.

In the Tools toolbar, select the Hand tool, click in the Camera view and drag.
You can also Hold down the Spacebar, click in the Camera view and move your mouse in the direction you want to pan the view.

Rotate View

The Rotate View tool lets you rotate the Camera view, the same way as you would do with a real animation disc. This tool can also be used in the Perspective view.