Guidelines and Tips for Animating Game Assets in Harmony

The following are guidelines to follow when animating a character in Harmony if you intend to export it for use in Unity.

NOTEYou do not need to follow these guidelines if you intend to export a rendered sprite sheet—see Exporting Rigged Sprite Sheets or Rendered Sprite Sheets.
Animation on Pegs

When animating game sprites in Harmony, you should animate the body parts on their parent pegs or their deformations, and not on the drawing layers directly, to keep the drawing information and the animation information separate.

TIPTo facilitate this workflow, you can enable the Peg Selecton Mode option in the Tool Properties of the Transform tool. This will ensure that, when you click on a drawing layer in the Camera view, its parent peg is selected instead.
Animation Techniques

It is recommended to use geometrical transformations—done with the Transform tool or the Advanced Animation tools—to animate the body parts of your rig as much as possible, as those are easier for Unity and for graphics cards to render. You should only use deformations, drawings swaps or frame by frame animation when necessary.

Deformations

If you want to use deformations for your animation, you must use Game Bone deformations. Game Bone deformations are similar to regular Bone deformations, but have less options and are designed to render the way Unity would render them—see About Game Bone Deformations.

Exported Assets

Drawings that are not used by your character or its props will not be exported with the sprite sheet. Hence, you do not need to delete unused drawings from your scene to optimize the exported assets.