Creating Hierarchies

Harmony lets you build your rig in an elaborate hierarchy, allowing you to set which parts of your rig should influence other limbs, and how they can move independently. For example, when rigging a simple character's arm, you can make the forearm layer a child of the arm layer, and the hand layer a child of the forearm layer. This way, if the character moves their forearm, the hand will follow, and if they move their arm, the forearm and hand will follow.

When building a basic character rig, you should at least have a hierarchy for each arm and each leg. You can make a hierarchy going from the torso, the neck and the head, and rig the arms to the torso, and you can rig the legs to the hips. This would make a hierarchy like this:

When rigging, keep in mind that the order of the layers in the Timeline view affects the order in which they are rendered. Layers on top of the list will be rendered over layers at the bottom of the list. Likewise, in the Node view, layers that are connected to the leftmost port of a composite are rendered on top of layers connected to ports to the right. Should you need to change a layer's order while animating, you can nudge this layer's position on the Z-axis to override the layer order and force it to appear beneath or over other layers.