About Environments, Jobs and Scenes in Web Control Center

Every project you create with the Harmony solution starts with an environment, the highest level in the Web Control Center. After that, you can add jobs and scenes. Elements (layers and columns) and drawings can only be created directly in Harmony Advanced or Harmony Premium when working with the Web Control Center.

The Web Control Center divides your animation project into the following categories which organize the components of your animated projects:

  • Environment: This is the name of your animation project.

Example: adventure_movie

  • Jobs: These are the major sections of an environment, such as sequences or episodes.

Example: adv_seq_001, adv_seq_002

IMPORTANT: All jobs are stored in the same location in the Harmony database. Be sure to prefix all job names appropriately, so you can identify the project in which it belongs. Each job must have a different name. You cannot give two jobs the same name.
  • Scenes: These are the different shots in a job.

Scenes are contained in their respective job folder in the Harmony database. If desired, prefix all scenes names appropriately, so you can identify the environment and job to which they belong.

Example: adv_sc_001, adv_sc_002, adv_sc_003 and so on.

As your projects come and go, you will probably want to start cleaning up your database, as well as your server's hard drive, by removing old and obsolete environments and their associated animation data.

IMPORTANT: After you delete a scene, job, or environment, the associated data is permanently removed from your storage disks. Make sure you really want to erase these items before you delete them as there is no way to retrieve the data after it has been erased.

You might want to export old environments and archive them somewhere else before you delete them from your system.

NOTE: If you are working in a mixed Windows/Mac OS X/Linux environment or share files with other studios that do, you should use lowercase letters to name the various items in your animation projects and not include any spaces. For example, write the_show instead of The Show. This is useful for Linux because it is case-sensitive whereas Windows is not.