About Toon Boom Harmony Essentials

Toon Boom Harmony Essentials 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.

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 Applications

Harmony Essentials includes the following applications:

As soon as Harmony is installed on your computer, you can launch the different applications that were installed with it:

  • On Windows: Open the Start menu and, in the list of programs, select Harmony 24 Essentials to find a list of all the applications bundled with Harmony.
  • On macOS: Launch Harmony by opening Finder, going to Applications > Harmony 24 Essentials and double-clicking onHarmony Essentials. Then, in the top menu, select Harmony Essentials > Tools to find a list of the side applications bundled with Harmony.
  • On GNU/Linux: In the GNOME top menu, select Applications > Harmony 24 Essentials to find shortcuts for all the applications bundled with Harmony.

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.

NOTE When 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 Essentials, 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.

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

Control Center

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.