Drawing View Menu

The Drawing View menu lets you access tools, set morphing parameters, lock or unlock layers, and select elements in the Drawing view.

Command Description

Edit

Cut

Removes selected objects. You can then paste the object or its properties to another object.

Copy

Copies selected objects and properties.

Paste

Places an object you cut or copied into the location you select in a view.

Delete

Removes selected objects.

Select All

Selects all drawing objects in the current drawing window in the Drawing, Timeline and Camera views. This helps you manage multiple objects as one when moving them.

Deselect All

Deselects all selected objects in the Drawing and Camera views.

Select Stroke With Current Colour

Select the strokes that contain the currently selected colour.

Invert Selection

Deselects the currently selected items and selects all other items that were not selected. For example, if some lines are selected in a drawing, this command will deselect them and select any other lines in the drawing that were not selected.

View

Zoom In

Zooms in the view.

Zoom Out

Zooms out the view.

Reset Zoom

Resets the view’s zoom to its default position.

Rotate View CW

Rotates the Camera view 30 degrees clockwise, like an animation table.

Rotate View CCW

Rotates the Camera view 30 degrees counter-clockwise, like an animation table.

Reset Rotation

Resets the view’s rotation to its default position.

Reset Pan

Resets the view’s pan to its default position.

Reset View

Resets the view to its default position.

Switch to Colour Art

Displays the Colour Art layer. When switching art layers, you can edit the selected layer without affecting the other one.

Preview Line Art and Colour Art

Displays all Art layers.

Grid

Show Grid: Displays the grid.

Grid Outline Only: Displays the outline of the grid only.

Underlay: Displays the grid under the drawing elements.

Overlay: Displays the grid over the drawing elements.

Square Grid: Displays a standard square grid.

12 Field Grid: Displays a 12-field size grid.

16 Field Grid: Displays a 16-field size grid.

Onion Skin

Show Onion Skin: Lets Lets you preview the previous and next drawings. By default, the previous drawings appear in a shade of red and the next drawings are displayed with a shade of green. You can change these colours in the Preferences dialog box. 

Show Centre Line:

No Previous Drawing: Displays no previous drawing.

Previous Drawing: Displays the previous drawing.

Previous Two Drawings: Displays the previous two drawings.

Previous Three Drawings: Displays the previous three drawings.

No Next Drawing: Displays no next drawing.

Next Drawing: Displays the next drawing.

Next Two Drawings: Displays the next two drawings.

Next Three Drawings: Displays the next three drawings.

Reduce One Previous Drawing: Reduces the number of previous visible drawings by one.

Add One Previous Drawing: Adds one drawing to the number of previous visible drawings.

Reduce One Next Drawing: Reduces the number of next visible drawings by one.

Add One Next Drawing: Adds one drawing to the number of next visible drawings.

Light Table

Turns on the light table so you can see Turns on the light table so you can see the previous and subsequent active layers in washed-out colours. It is useful for seeing the other layers when designing, animating or cleaning up your animation.

Backlight

Produces Produces a silhouette effect by changing the drawing’s coloured areas into a single dark, solid colour. Use this to verify the completeness of the ink and paint process. Any unpainted zones can be seen as the light shows through the unpainted areas of the silhouetted drawing.
Show

Show Strokes

Displays the strokes in your drawings so that the invisible lines stand out.

Show Strokes with Colour Wash

Displays strokes with washed-out colours.

Highlight Selected Colour

Identify a selected colour swatch used in a drawing.

Show Morphing Key Drawing Thumbnail

When using the Morphing tools, this displays the source or destination drawing as a reference in the bottom corner of the Drawing view.

Show Scan Information

Displays a status bar showing the scanning information at the bottom of the Drawing and Camera view.

Desk

No Thumbnail

Changes the size of the drawing desk thumbnails.

Small Thumbnail

Medium Thumbnail

Large Thumbnail

Remove Selected Drawing

Clears selected drawing from drawing desk.

Remove All Drawings

Clears all drawing from drawing desk.

Drawing

Clean Up

Remove Dirt: Opens the Remove Dirt dialog box where you can specify the number and size of dots removal from a selected drawing.

Remove Hair: Opens the Remove Hair dialog box where you can specify the number and length of hairs for removal from a selected drawing. This removes any small strokes created in the Colour Art layer from very thick lines or filled zones. Increase the value to select larger strokes for removal from the drawing.

Close Gaps: Closes small gaps in a drawing by creating small, invisible strokes between the two closest points to close the colour zone. You do not need to trace directly over the gap. You can draw it a few millimeters away. The two closest points automatically close the gap.

Remove Art Inside Selection: Removes any art inside a selection. It is recommended that you clean your Colour Art level as well. If you have a stroke accumulation in the Colour Art, it can result in large output files, especially if you work in high definition resolutions.

Remove Art Inside Selection On All Drawings: Removes any art inside all drawings selected with the Permanent Selection option in the Select tool.

Remove Art Outside Selection: Removes any art existing outside a selection. It is recommended that you clean the Colour Art level as well. If you have a stroke accumulation in the Colour Art, it can result in large output files, especially if you work in high-definition resolutions.

Remove Art Outside Selection On All Drawings: Removes any art outside all drawings selected with the Permanent Selection option in the Select tool.

Paint

Unpaint Selection: Unpaints any art existing inside a selection.

Unpaint Selection on All Drawings: Unpaints all art contained inside a selection on all the drawings within the same layer.

Unpaint Outside Selection: Unpaints any art existing outside a selection. If no selection have been drawn using the Select tool, the entire drawing will be unpainted.

Unpaint Outside Selection on All Drawings: Unpaints all art outside a selection on all the drawings within the same layer.

Repaint Selection: Repaints any art inside a selection.

Repaint Selection on All Drawings: Repaints any art inside a selection on all the drawings contained within the same layer.

Repaint Outside Selection: Repaints any art outside a selection. If no selection has been drawn using the Select tool, the entire drawing will be repainted.

Repaint Outside Selection on All Drawings: Repaints any art outside a selection on all the drawings contained within the same layer.

Convert

Pencil Lines to Brush Strokes: Converts the selected centreline pencil strokes into contour strokes brush lines.

Brush Strokes to Pencil Lines: Converts selected contour strokes into centreline pencil strokes. The brush stroke thickness will be lost.

Strokes to Pencil Lines: Converts the selected invisible line to a pencil line.

Brush Apart Text Layers: Text is treated as a single drawing object. This separates the text so each character becomes an individual drawing object you can select and modify independently.

Optimize

Flatten: Merges Merges drawing objects and brush strokes into a single layer. If you draw new lines to fix a drawing or line with many brush strokes, it can be useful to flatten them all into a single shape. By default, lines are drawn one on top of each other. If you intend to repaint the lines or modify their shape, it will be easier if they are flattened.

Smooth: Smooths selected drawing strokes and removes extra points.

Create Contour Strokes: Adds a permanent invisible line around a shape that was drawn directly in Harmony. This allows you to unpaint lines with the Paint tool but maintain the shape of the lines, should you need to repaint later.

Remove Contour Strokes: Remove any permanently invisible lines that were created while scanning and vectorizing drawings or manually adding contour strokes. This is useful for removing the intersection triangles created during vectorization.

Remove Extra Strokes: Removes strokes inside painted area. This option only works after the painted drawing is flattened.

Optimize: Reduces 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.

Crop Brush Textures: Crops Crops 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.

Reduce Drawing Texture Resolution:

When you import and vectorize as texture (colour) a high resolution image, the size of your drawing can be heavy. You can reduce the size and resolution of the textures in a drawing.

Arrange

Bring to Front: Moves the selected art to the front (on top).

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

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

Send to Back: Moves the selected art behind everything (bottom / back).

Transform

Flip Horizontal: Flips the current selection horizontally.

Flip Vertical: Flips the current selection vertically.

Rotate 90 CW: Rotates the current selection 90 degrees clockwise.

Rotate 90 CCW: Rotates the current selection 90 degrees counter-clockwise.

Rotate 180: Rotates the current selection 180 degrees.

Create Empty Drawing

Creates Creates a drawing in the selected cell, replacing any drawing that may already be exposed in that cell and the following ones until it meets another drawing, key exposure or a blank cell.

Duplicate Drawings

Lets you duplicate the drawing and work on a copy of it. This lets you modify an existing drawing but retain the original. When duplicating a drawing, the selected cell is replaced with the new drawing. The exposure of the original drawing that was on the current cell is removed. The original drawing is not deleted from the project folder or other cells in which it is exposed.

When duplicating a drawing, the selected cell is replaced with the new drawing. The exposure of the original drawing that was on the current cell is removed. The original drawing is not deleted from the project folder or other cells in which it is exposed.

Delete Selected Drawings

Permanently removes selected drawings. Once you save your project, these drawings cannot be recovered.

Rename Drawing

Lets you give a selected drawing a new name.

Create Colour Art From Line Art

Lets you use the outline you traced on one of the four embedded layers (line art, colour art, overlay, underlay) and create invisible strokes to paint your drawings on separate layers. This provides more inking and painting flexibility.

You can also configure this option to create the invisible strokes on any of the four embedded layers.

Generate Auto-Matte

Automatically creates a matte from a selected drawing or all drawings on a layer.

Opens the auto-Matte dialog box where you can set the radius of the lines depending on how precise or rough your line is.

You can also select the source and destinatin layers from which the matte will be created.

Adjust Line Texture Opacity

Lets you adjust the contrast and opacity of textured lines in a drawing.

Change Bitmap Drawing Resolution

Lets you Lets you 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. This feature is very useful when you need to have a full resolution of a bitmap image (such as imported bitmaps as .psd or .tga for the background) for tracing to create a matte directly in Harmony.By default, Harmony creates small thumbnail images when imported as bitmap in order to increase performance by using a small thumbnail image instead of using the original large size bitmap for animation work in Harmony. This will make difficult to view details or trace due to the low resolution (blurry). This option temporary increases the resolution of bitmaps up to their original bitmap resolution to make tracing easier.

Previous Drawing

Once a cell is selected in the Timeline or Xsheet view, you can navigate between the drawings, frames, and layers. Displays the previous drawing, next drawing, previous layer or next layer.

Displays the previous drawing, next drawing, previous layer or next layer.

Next Drawing

Previous Layer

Next Layer

Colour Protection

Toggle Current Colour Protection: Temporarily enables/disables the Colour Protection feature so you can quickly correct wrongly inked or painted areas under protected colour without readjusting the Current Colour Protection option.

Respect Colour Protection: In the Colour view, you can protect a colour swatch to avoid repainting or unpainting the zones linked to that swatch. If you using the Paint tool and this option is deselected, you will repaint or unpaint the protected colours on your drawings until you enable the option again.

Drawing Tools

Select

Lets you select elements from the Camera and Drawing views.

Contour Editor

Lets you add, remove or modify points on a vector line and control them.

Pencil Editor

Lets you modify the thick and thin contour of a pencil line (basically a central vector shape). Shape control points along the central spine allow you to adjust the stroke curve and position.

Cutter

Lets you cut a drawing area to move, copy, cut or delete it.

Smooth Editor

Lets you optimize contours and reduce the number of points on a line.

Perspective

Lets you deform a drawing selection and alter its perspective.

Envelope

Lets you deform and warp part of a drawing using a grid envelope and Bezier handles.

Reposition All Drawings

Lets you reposition, scale, rotate or skew all drawing strokes on every drawing included in a layer.

Drawing Pivot

Lets you set pivots on a characters, drawings and symbols.

Brush

A pressure-sensitive tool for creating a contour shape with a thick and thin line effect, as if created with a paint brush.

Pencil

A pressure-sensitive tool for drawing the final images, such as character nodes, cut-out puppet and clean animation. Creates a central vector shape.

Text

Lets you type text in your project using various fonts and text attributes.

Eraser

A pressure-sensitive tool for precisely erasing parts of a drawing.

Dropper

Lets you pick a colour directly from a drawing.

Morphing

Lets you control a morphing sequence by placing different types of hints to help Harmony morph the animation the way you want it.

Line

Lets you draw straight lines which you can then edit.

Rectangle

Ellipse

Polyline

Paint

Lets you paint both empty and filled zones.

Ink

Lets you paint only the segment you clicked on between two intersections to be painted.

Repaint Brush

Close Gap

Lets you close small gaps in a drawing by creating small, invisible strokes between the two closest points.

Stroke

Lets you draw stokes, connect line ends and flatten lines.

Edit Gradient/Texture

Lets you modify the position of a gradient or texture colour within a specific zone.

Hand

Lets you pan the Drawing or Camera view.

Zoom

Lets you zoom in and out of the Drawing or Camera view.

Rotate View

Lets you rotate the Drawing or Camera view just like with a real animation disc. Can also be used in Perspective view.

Morphing

Morphing

Lets you control a morphing sequence by placing different types of hints to help Harmony morph the animation the way you want it.

Contour Hint

The Contour Hint point is used on the colour fill zone and brush lines; in other words, on Contour vectors. It allows you to control the line thickness and contour position. Also, if a contour is not animated correctly, you can use hints to correct the animation. For example, if a flag is not waving properly.

When adding a Contour Hint point, make sure to place it far enough away from the contour so you can see it snap to the contour.

Contour Hint points are yellow.

Zone Hint

The Zone Hint point is used on a colour zone to control the proximity rule. The Zone Hint is placed in the centre of the colour zone. Sometimes a colour zone is not associated with the corresponding one by default. For example, in a splash animation there are many water droplets that are the same colour. Harmony automatically morphs the droplet to the nearest one. This is not always the one you may have predicted. A Zone Hint will force a colour zone to morph with another one.

Zone Hint points are cyan in colour.

Pencil Hint

A Pencil Hint point is used to control a pencil line, also known as central vector. It can be used on drawings that were done using the Pencil, Polyline, Ellipse, Line and Rectangle tools. Like the Contour Hint, the Pencil Hint snaps to the central vector. Make sure to place it far enough away from the line so you will see it snap when you move it.

Pencil Hint points are magenta in colour.

Vanishing Point Hint

A Vanishing Point Hint is used to control the trajectory of a vanishing shape. A shape will vanish from the source drawing when there is no corresponding shape in the destination drawing. If you do not place a Vanishing Point Hint to control the point of disappearance, the shape will vanish into its centre.

Vanishing Point Hint points are green in colour.

Appearing Point Hint

An Appearing Point Hint is used to control the trajectory of an appearing shape. A shape will appear in the destination drawing when there is no corresponding shape in the source drawing. If you do not place an Appearing Point Hint to control the point of appearance, the shape will appear from its centre and expand outwards.

Appearing Point Hint points are violet in colour.

Switch Between Morphing Key Drawings

Toggles Toggles between the two key drawings in your morphing sequence. This option is useful while setting hints. You can use the default keyboard shortcut F4 to toggle between your drawings.

Go to First Frame

Goes to the first frame of your morphing sequence.

Go to Previous Frame

Goes to the previous frame of the selected frame in the morphing sequence.

Go to Next Frame

Goes to the next frame of the selected frame in the morphing sequence.

Go to Last Frame

Goes to the last frame of your morphing sequence.

Suggest HInts

Automatically sets Automatically sets hint points on key drawings as a help tool. If you're not sure where to set hints, you can use this option. It will set the main hints which you can then fine tune.

Hide Hints

Temporarily Temporarily hides the hint points from the key drawings. Use this option when you have a series of hint points hiding some lines you would like to see.