Chapter 2: About Toon Boom Harmony
Toon Boom Harmony is the most advanced professional animation software on the market. Bringing together an impressive 2D drawing toolset with the ability to work in a real 3D space, and import 3D models,
Harmony Server combines the animation toolset of Harmony with an impressive database for collaborative workflow. Share assets, batch vectorize and render, and increase production efficiency.
Top Features
- Advanced Drawing Tools: Texture brushes, and thick and thin pencil lines
- Smart Colour Palettes: Colour you can adjust on the fly
- Character Rigging: Hierarchy, deform, and effects for creating sophisticated rigs
- Special Effects: An array of effects including highlights and shadows, glows, blurs, and a full particle effects engine
- Real 3D Camera: A camera you can reposition in a full 3D space
- 3D Integration: Allowing you to import 3D models, position and animate them in 3D space
- Batch Vectorizing and Rendering: Quickly process images for import and export through a single workstation or a render farm
- Database File Sharing: Share libraries, colour palettes, animation, and more across the whole team
- Production Pipeline Integration: Seamlessly integrate content from pre-production via Toon Boom Storyboard Pro
Toon Boom Pipeline
Toon Boom Harmony has been recognized for its excellence by winning many awards, including a Primetime Emmy® Engineering Award and the prestigious Ub Iwerks Annie Award for the integrated pipeline with Toon Boom Storyboard Pro.
Harmony works perfectly with Toon Boom Storyboard Pro for all pre-production phases. Therefore, animatics created in Toon Boom Storyboard Pro can be imported seamlessly in Harmony for animation and scene setup guidance.
Render Resolution
The render resolution for the various editions of Harmony are:
• | Harmony Essentials: 2K (2048x1556) |
• | Harmony Advanced: 4K (4096x3112) |
• | Harmony Premium: Unlimited |
Modules
Harmony Server is composed of the following modules:
These modules are all accessible from:
- Windows: Start > Programs > Harmony 12.2
- Mac OS X: Applications > Toon Boom Harmony 12.2.1
- Linux: /usr/local/ToonBoomAnimation/harmonyPremium_12.2.1/lnx86_64/bin/
-paint
Controlcenter
Scan
Play
ServerActivation
ClientActivation
LicenseWizard
The Control Center module controls the database and organizes the production. The Control Center module is used to create the environments, jobs and scenes, as well as importing and exporting scene packages. The technical director or system administrator also uses the Control Center to create the login information for users to access the database.
Control Center is also available in a web form where users can access scenes via the Internet—seeWeb Control Center.
Harmony Premium, Harmony Advanced, and Harmony Essentials are the core of Harmony. It comprises all the major drawing, animation and compositing features. It is used to work in the scene: design, character breakdown, cut-out animation, traditional animation, ink and paint, exposure sheet, timeline, effects, compositing, camera moves, colour styling, and so on.
The Scan module is used to scan drawings in batch. It creates a drawing list from the timing and exposure previously created in the exposure sheet via the module.
Paint module is a component of the module. It contains the drawing, painting and colour styling tools. It is mainly used in large traditional animation studios to maintain a structure and avoid users having to learn the full product application. This way, the colour styling or ink and paint team can concentrate on their task without having to deal with the compositing and timing tools.
The Play module is used to play back the rendered image sequences enabling the user to view the final scenes and compositing results.
You can access your database via the Web Control Center. When you're running a studio, you will most likely have a database set up. This enables all the artists working on your production to share the same scenes and assets.
The Web Control Center lets you host this database on the Internet. This way, freelancers can log in from anywhere with an Internet connection. Then they can download a scene from the database, work on it, and upload it again.
You no longer need to spend time copying files to an FTPor require an administrator to export and import files from the database. You can do it all directly through the Web Control Center.
To learn more about the Web Control Center, refer to the following guides:
- Installation Guide
- Control Center Guide