Patch Articulation

The Harmony advanced rigging can use an articulation fixing technique called Patch Articulation. This technique is a colour fill patch that is drawn on a third layer and is used to cover the joint lines. It is a simple, yet powerful method.

With this technique, you avoid having to create a correction layer at the end of the animation to fill the gaps in the joints. You do not need to worry about the articulations at all. Once a patch is set, the articulation is fixed for the entire length of the animation.

To make this technique even more efficient, Harmony lets you draw the patch inside the same drawing, but on a separate contained layer. The Line Art and Colour Art layers are not only useful in traditional ink and paint, but also in advanced cut-out breakdown. You can draw the patch in the Colour Art layer and extract it in the Node view. The advantage of doing it this way is that when animating and using the drawing substitution, the patch drawing will change at the same time as the main drawing.