About Deformation

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Deformations let you animate bitmap or vector-based graphics, including gradients and textures. Deformations act as a skeleton with limbs and articulations you can bend, reshape, and curve. You can deform a character made out of one, or many, drawing or image layers and make it move as if it were a cut-out puppet. This also allows you to take an area in a single bitmap image and create animation by distortion.

A deformation skeleton is composed of deformation nodes, which are the various pieces (here represented as layers or nodes) required to articulate or deform your drawings, such as a series of bones, curves or game bones—see Deformation Nodes.

NOTE: It's important to note that the deformation feature was completely rebuilt in Harmony 12 to simplify the process and no longer works like it was in the previous releases. If you would like to convert characters with deformation chains created in Harmony 11 or before, you can use the TB_ConvertLegacyDeformation.js script to do so—see About Legacy Deformations.

All the Deformation features are handled from the Deformation toolbar. For information about the Deformation toolbar, see Deformation Toolbar.