About Toon Boom Harmony Premium

Toon Boom Harmony is the animation production tool that provides artists and studios with powerful and innovative technology used in blockbuster films, TV series, online series, advertisements, games and many other productions.

The technology in Harmony gives artists and studios the freedom to create animation using various techniques, including:

  • Traditional animation, where each drawing is sketched and cleaned up on paper, scanned in Harmony, then digitally inked and painted.
  • Paperless animation, where each drawing is created from scratch using the drawing and animation tools in Harmony.
  • Digital, or cut-out animation, where character rigs are created to be animated by moving, rotating, stretching, squashing, deforming or swapping the drawings of different body parts.

Harmony has a very wide set of features to unlock the full potential of digital animation, such as:

  • Deformers, which allows you to define articulations on a drawing and deform it without having to re-draw it.
  • Visual effects, which allows you to streamline the production pipeline by reducing the need to use third party tools.
  • A 3D space, which allows you to move and rotate layers in all directions and create multiplane environments.
  • The ability to import and animate 3D models and use Harmony to integrate 2D and 3D animation into the same production.

Using Storyboard Pro, you can create your production's animated storyboard or animatic, then export it into separate Harmony scenes, allowing you to seamlessly create your scene layouts and poses based on your storyboard.

Harmony also works with other software by importing and exporting a wide variety of industry standard file formats, allowing it to easily integrate different pipelines.

Harmony Server

Harmony Server combines the animation capabilities of Harmony with a network interface that allows several machines on a local network to connect to a database of Harmony scenes. Using Harmony Server, you can create, manage, batch-vectorize and batch-render the scenes in your production, load and save scenes directly from and to the network storage of the server, share colour palettes, drawings, templates and other assets between project collaborators, and track the different production and approval stages of your scenes. This allows artists to collaborate to your production in real time.

For productions that must rely on remote project collaborators who do not have access to the studio's local network, Harmony Server also includes a web-based interface, called WebCC, which allows users to check out scenes from the database to work on them locally, then check them back in with their changes.

Harmony Applications

Harmony Stand Alone includes the following applications:

Harmony Server includes the following applications:

You can launch the different Harmony applications from your machine's desktop, at the following locations:

  • Windows: Start > Programs > Harmony 15.0 Premium
  • macOS: Finder > Applications > Toon Boom Harmony 15.0 Premium or Toon Boom Harmony 15.0 Premium Network
  • GNU/Linux: Applications > Harmony 15.0 Premium

Harmony

Harmony Premium, Harmony Advanced, and Harmony Essentials are the core of Harmony. It comprises all the major drawing, animation and compositing features. It is used to work in the scene: design, character breakdown, cut-out animation, traditional animation, ink and paint, exposure sheet, timeline, effects, compositing, camera moves, colour styling, and so on.

Harmony Stage Module

NOTEWhen using Harmony Stand Alone, you can create your scenes directly in the Harmony application. When using Harmony Server, you must use Control Center to create scenes.

To learn more about Harmony Premium, you can refer to the following sections of the documentation:

  • Getting Started Guide
  • User Guide
  • Reference Guide
  • Preferences Guide
  • Keyboard Shortcuts Guide
  • Scripting Guide
  • Utilities Guide

Play

Harmony renders scenes in sequences of images. The Play application is used to play the rendered images at the same's framerate and with its sound track.

Harmony Play Module

To learn more about Play, refer to the Play Application documentation.

Paint

The Harmony Paint application is used mostly in large productions in which a dedicated Ink and Paint or Colour team is employed to colour drawings in traditional or paperless productions. It allows users to edit scenes in a much more simple user interface with limited functionality, in which it is only possible to edit existing drawings in a scene using Harmony's drawing tools.

Using Harmony Paint has two main advantages:

  • It allows Ink and Paint and Colour artists to quickly learn how to perform their task in the software, as they only have to master a limited set of features and user interfaces.
  • It allows to project collaborators to work on the same scene. Because Harmony Paint is only able to modify drawings in the scene and nothing else, Paint will only open and lock the drawings that the user selects when loading a scene, and will leave all other assets, as well as the scene itself, unlocked. This allows another project collaborator to work on other aspects of the scene in Harmony, such as staging, camera movements, digital animation, effects, or anything that does not involve making changes to drawings, at the time as the Ink and Paint artist.

Harmony Paint can only open Harmony Server scenes. Hence, it can only be used in a Harmony Server environment. Harmony Paint is typically used to ink and paint cleaned-up drawings. In order to be able to work on a scene, its exposure sheet should already be filled with drawing numbers or names, which can be done in Harmony. It is not possible to fill your scene's exposure sheet from Harmony Paint.

To learn more about Paint, refer to the Paint Application documentation.

Scan

The Scan module is used to scan drawings in batch into a Harmony scene in which the name and exposure of drawings has already been set using the Harmony application.

Harmony Scan Module

To learn more about Scan, refer to the Scan Application guide.

NOTEIt is also possible to scan drawings directly in the Harmony application.

Control Center

The Control Center module controls the database and organizes the production. The Control Center module is used to create the environments, jobs and scenes, as well as importing and exporting scene packages. The technical director or system administrator also uses Control Center to create the login information for users to access the database.

Control Center Module Icon

To learn more about the Control Center, refer to the WebCC documentation.

WebCC

You can access your database via the WebCC. When you're running a studio, you will most likely have a database set up. This enables all the artists working on your production to share the same scenes and assets.

The WebCC lets you host this database on the Internet. This way, freelancers can log in from anywhere with an Internet connection. Then they can download a scene from the database, work on it, and upload it again.

You no longer need to spend time copying files to an FTPor require an administrator to export and import files from the database. You can do it all directly through the WebCC.

To learn more about WebCC, refer to the Control Center documentation.

License Wizard

Control Center Module Icon

License Wizard is what allows you to activate, manage and return your product licenses. You can sign in to your Toon Boom account and activate its licenses one by one or all simultaneously, or enter your license's product code if you have purchased a non-subscription license.

To learn about License Wizard, refer to the License Activation documentation.