How to Add Effects to a Scene

When creating a scene, rigging a character or once your animation is finished, you can add effects such as blurs, glows, shadows, colour filters and transparency filters and to enhance your project's quality. Effects change the way layers or groups of layers are rendered in your scene.

About Effects

Effects are special types of layers that you can add to your scene's structure. For an effect layer to work, it must be connected as the child of a drawing, a group, or another effect. Effects only alter the element that they are connected to. This gives you flexibility in deciding which elements of your scene are affected by an effect.

Some effects need to be linked to another layer, referred to as a matte layer, which is used to define the area they should affect. The most basic example of this is the Cutter effect. Alone, a cutter effect has no impact on the drawing it is connected to. Once combined with a matte layer, the Cutter effect cuts the shape of the matte out of the drawing.

A matte layer is simply a regular drawing layer that is connected to an effect as its matte. The effect takes the shape of the drawing in the matte layer to determine the area of the drawing it affects. The colours and details in the matte layer are ignored by the effect, only its shape is taken in account.

In the Timeline view, an effect must be rigged as the child of the drawing layer or group it is meant to affect.

If the effect can use a matte layer, it will have a Matte parameter when you expand its parameters list. You can drag and drop the layer you want to use a matte for your effect onto the Matte parameter of your effect to link them.

If the effect can use a matte layer, it will have a matte port on its left to which the matte layer can be connected.

Once your effect is connected, you can adjust its parameters by selecting it, then adjusting its parameters using the Layer Properties view. You can also double-click on the layer to open its Layer Properties dialog. If desired, you can even animate the parameters of your effect by converting their values to functions.

Adding an Effect

In Harmony, you can add effects by selecting the layer or group you wish to add an effect to, then adding the effect through the Timeline view's Add Layers menu. Then, you can achieve the intended effect by adjusting its parameters in the Layers Properties view, and connecting it to a matte layer if applicable.

Using the Cutter Effect

The Cutter effect cuts out a portion of an image. To do this, it needs to be connected to the drawing it is intended to cut as well as to a matte layer. The cutter will take the shape of the drawing in the matte layer and cut this shape out of the drawing layer. This is especially useful if you want to make a character disappear between a background element, or if you want to cut out a hole in the middle of a character.

Like all effects that use a matte, the Cutter's effect has an Inverted parameter, which is disabled by default. When enabled, the Cutter will have the reverse effect: Instead of cutting the matte's shape out of the drawing, it will cut everything outside of the matte's shape out of the drawing, leaving only the parts of the drawing that are covered by the matte. This can be useful if, for example, you want to draw shadows or highlights for a character, but you don't want to have to worry about them bleeding beyond your character's outline. You can simply connect your shadow or highlight to an inverted cutter, and use a clone of your character as the matte, and your effect will not display outside of your character's outlines.

Animating an Effect

You may need to animate some effects to obtain the expected results. For example, you may want the radius of a Glow effect to slowly increase and decrease to make it pulsate throughout a scene, or you may want the transparency of a Transparency effect to increase from 0% to 100% to make a drawing vanish.

Almost all numerical parameters in an effect can be attached to a function. A function allows you to set a parameter to different values at different points in the scene by adding keyframes to it, and setting each keyframes to a specific value. Between keyframes, the value of the parameter will progress from the value of the previous keyframe to the value of the next keyframe. Drawing layers are animated by having their coordinates associated to functions. Likewise, effects can be animated by associating their parameters to functions.

Some effect parameters can be animated directly in the Timeline view, but not all. When you expand an effect's parameters in the Timeline view, some of its parameters may be hidden to avoid cluttering the Timeline view. You can animate those parameters from the Layer Properties view or the Layer Properties dialog, which display all of a layer's parameters.

NOTETo learn how to preview animated effects, refer to About Effects Preview.

Creating an Effect Based on an Animated Character

The following tutorial demonstrates how to combine Effects with other Harmony functionalities to easily create a drop shadow for an animated character. By following these steps, you can create a drop shadow that will automatically follow your character's animation, even if you change the animation afterward.