Toon Boom Harmony

ToonBoom Harmony is a leading software that specifically specializes in animation production, with a robust set of tools for both traditional hand-drawn workflows, as well as digital keyframe-based motion and deformations.

We call the program Harmony. ToonBoom is a company name, like Adobe. So we try not to call it ToonBoom.

Harmony is likely the least familiar program to most students; at times the learning curve may feel steep. However, the payoff is worth it in terms of this being one of the best programs for digitally-drawn animation. It is used widely in animation production around the world.

Before you dive into the program and start drawing, read the following step-by-step.

It covers some basics of the Harmony interface, file structure, and a few key preferences to check before you start. Take a moment to get these correct and you’ll have a (hopefully) smooth experience. If you skip these steps, you might hit some frustrations. (Special thanks to Kalika K. Sharma for much of this.)

Below are two sets of tutorials, one from the Toon Boom website, the other from LinkedIn Learning.

Both cover similar territory. Watch whichever you prefer, and remember they are there to return to throughout the course. I find that when I return to tutorials after doing some work in a program, I often pick up new tricks and tips that I didn’t realize the importance of the first time around.

Harmony Premium Kick Start  provides Toon Boom’s familiarization tutorials.  Watch the first How to Create and Setup your Project With Harmony Premium and then dive deeper into the drawing and animating tools in the second set.

Toon Boom Harmony Essential Training by Dermot O'Connor provides extensive tutorials on LinkedIn Learning. The entire course is excellent and thorough, but to get started you may wish to just watch the Interface and Drawing sections (1 & 2). Feel free to return to this course throughout the course, and I’ll link to some specific topics below.

As a reminder, remember to log into the NYU Home Page using your net ID first. Then enter LinkedIn Learning via the tile on the Work tab. By logging in via the NYU portal you have access to all tutorials and files on LinkedIn Learning, which normally require a subscription.

Important Note: These are the shortcuts if the preferences is set to Harmony Premium. If your instructor uses the Flash set of shortcuts, please reference the materials from your specific section.

All shortcuts in Harmony are customizable.  It’s super important to set preferences correctly if you are new to the program (go back to Interface and Setup if you skipped it!)

Harmony provides complete reference material for their shortcuts. 

By clicking on the menu at the right of the above page you can access a printable reference sheet for each panel of the program (e.g. Timeline or Camera).  A reference of that can be found below. 

However, if I’m looking for a specific shortcut it’s often easier just to search for the function in the Preferences window.  These are Harmony's Instructions on doing that. 

The approach to drawing the walk cycle presented here was developed by Zoya Baker for Intro To Animation Techniques. Special thanks to Zoya for sharing both her class materials and approach, which provided the framework for these tutorials.

Mechanics of walk cycle drawing covered in lecture are reviewed in the following tutorials, which also assume you have a basic familiarity with Harmony.

For reference, here are the drawing and frame numbers for Contact and Passing positions for a 12-drawing and 16-drawing walk cycle. 

• 12 drawings will give you a brisker walk and require fewer drawings, but has the added challenge of your in-betweens will have to divide the space into thirds between each contact and passing position.

• The 16 drawing cycle is a more leisurely walk. There are more drawings, however you may find it easier since all the in-betweens are halfway points.

Your instructor may assign a specific walk cycle, or leave the choice up to you.

The tutorial below assumes you have a basic familiarity with Harmony, as well as the mechanics of the walk cycle.

Once you have completed drawing the basic walk cycle, the next task is to loop your cycle and shift its position every time it cycles, so your character appears to walk across the frame. Here is a tutorial on how to do just that.

Harmony is intended as a shot-based program.

While it’s possible to create your entire film in a single Harmony project, you will quickly find the interface grows quite unwieldy. The program can slow down, crash more, and in general be much harder to navigate.

The recommended approach is to create each scene or shot in a separate Harmony project, then export your work and take those clips into Premiere or another editing program. Sometimes filmmakers add effects in After Effects or Photoshop.

There are many work-flows possible. The main point here is, we highly recommend that you not try to create your entire film in a single Harmony project.

But, you may ask, how do I move that lovingly-drawn character from scene 1 (inside the laundromat) to scene 2 (walking down the street)?

That’s where the Library comes in!

Harmony’s Library tab is where you save and access stored assets. It’s similar to the media browser in an editing program like Premiere or Final Cut.

With the important difference that you can save some or all of a scene created in Harmony (characters, objects in your film, backgrounds) and easily import them into another Harmony project.

Below are additional tutorials covering topics that may be useful as you advance in Harmony.

This important technique is the virtual version of taking your paper off of the pegs on your light tracer and repositioning it to trace over a drawing in a different position. It is an important traditional technique used to insure volume and shape remain consistent as your drawing changes position. 

Rigging a Layered Character (more from Dermot on Linked In learning). For cut-out style animation in Harmony take a look at the links below: Character Setup and Rigging

Using Harmony’s Multiplane Camera

Integrating a Photoshop Background

Deformations

Lip-Sync (both Auto and Manually): The general principles of mouth shape drawings and lip sync will be covered in one of the lectures. 

Reference images for mouth shapes can be found on Toon Boom’s website. You can also see a variety of mouth shapes by doing a simple Google Image Search

For most of your work in this course, exporting a QuickTime movie from Harmony will be simplest and work fine.

However, sometimes the colors may be off, or you may wish to export materials with an embedded alpha channel to composite in another program. In that case, you’ll need to export the “professional” way using write nodes in Harmony to export an image sequence. The interface can seem a little daunting if you’ve never worked in a node-based interface, but it’s really pretty intuitive when you get the hang of it.

Here are some resources:

Advanced Export Using Write Nodes

Rendering Images and Movies from the Node View

Many of Harmony’s features were developed for professional production companies, where entire teams of folks work on a single show or film.

To facilitate this, Harmony has ways to, for instance, have a “global” color palette that everyone on the production can reference so that colors remain consistent throughout the film. This may be more than you need to know at this point, but here is some deeper information on how Harmony regards your production color palettes, including local vs. linked values. 

There are lots of additional resources on the Toon Boom website.