Toon Boom Harmony is the worldwide standard for 2D animation productions; Harmony’s Drawing Engine helps our software stand out from the rest. For any animated project style, from clean and precise solid vector lines to organic textured bitmap lines, Harmony offers any creator an unparalleled assortment of advanced drawing tools. Seamlessly switch between brush to pencil, textured to solid or even from bitmap to vector with our powerful vectorization technology.

Harmony Brushes feel natural as you can access the most advanced features with our Dynamic Brushes, allowing you to customize your tips from a variety of parameters such as pressure, tilt or speed.

With Pencil lines, you have the ultimate freedom to change line thickness, tapper or texture after they have been drawn. Configure your desired transparency, import or create your line textures and draw those textures in real-time for both Brush and Pencil lines.

For the best possible results, no matter your level of expertise, Harmony lets you smooth or dynamically stabilize your lines as well as guide your drawings with rulers and perspective guides.

Take advantage of Harmony’s art layers (up to 4 in each drawing) to separate your lines from your colors or create sub-layers for a multitude of functions. No other animation software will give you this many options while working natively in vector and/or in bitmap!

When creating character rigs and animation for games, there are a few things to think about before starting. Artists and programmers should work together to make sure their needs are met.

What platforms will your game be created for?

Windows, Mac, Mobile, iOS, PS, XBOX, etc.

What game engine will you be using?

What animation style will be used to create the look of the game? Hand drawn, cut-out, with textures, etc.

These are just a few of the questions to consider before getting started. They all have an impact on how you design, build, and animate characters.

For example, if you’re planning a mobile game for smartphones, then you will most likely want to keep your game under 50 MB, so it can be downloaded without having to be on Wi-Fi. In that case, your most important consideration is to create efficient characters with very tight sprite sheets and reuse a lot of the animation to keep the file sizes small. During the process, you will need to:

Rig and animate characters in Harmony.

Extract the Harmony data.

Import the Harmony data into the game engine.

Keep in mind, if you’re working with a custom engine, you can also process the Harmony data that’s exported and use it in a custom game engine. If you need assistance with adapting data for your engine, contact store.toonboom.com/contact/support.

If you’re making a game for consoles, like the PS or Xbox, then you have the freedom to create larger textures. You may want to animate frame-by-frame, or you may want to animate with a cut-out character or both.

If you’re simply going to export on a frame-by-frame sequence, then you can use all the tools in Harmony without limitations. You can then process an exported image sequence into a sprite sheet.

For more information check out the Harmony Gaming software manual.

Create rigs using deformations (such as game bones) and add skinning to your rig for effective object swaps or costume changes at a push of a button.

Harmony can export deformations to the game engine XML format. Only hierarchies made of Game Bones can be successfully exported. In addition, Kinematic Outputs were implemented to complement your game bones.

Deformations in Harmony come with a wide set of features. However, some of these features are not compatible with the game engine SDK and must not be used for gaming. Hence, Game Bone deformers do not support the following standard Bone deformer features:

Zones of influence
Curve and Envelope deformations
Having more than a single pose in the deformation
hierarchy
Animating drawing pegs underneath deformation
groups

Creating versions of characters with palette differences is important when you plan to add character customiz-ation as a feature of your game. In Harmony, you may create multiple palettes for a character so that it can have a variety of different looks in your game.

In Harmony, once you create your character and its palettes, you may export the character to sprite sheets for each palette.

For more information check out the Harmony 22 Gaming software manual to learn How to create palette variations for a game character.

Export to any game engine with Harmony’s easel JS script which uses a json data structure to map each frame to an entry in the sprite sheet.

To facilitate better support within Game Editors, the Export to Sprite Sheet interface has been given some additional features to pack more information into the exported file.

Harmony Gaming also has full integration with Unity through our Harmony Gaming SDK, supporting access to skeleton information, drawing information, keyframe animation data, as well as deformations (bones and articulations only), cutters, transparency nodes and timing columns.

New Options
• Palette selection tab – Exclude certain palettes that you don’t want included in your exported file, this will cover all possible variations of palettes that will result in different colors showing on the character
• Encode to TBG – zips the XML files to the TBG custom file format so that they may be imported to Unity with Unity custom importers. When the files are imported, they will be treated like any asset in Unity and will contain sub- assets for textures, sprites, and animations. This improves the ergonomics of creating and moving character data and checking changes into source control.
• Improved performance on “Save and Export” – Exporting process generally takes 1/3 of the time compared to previous versions of Harmony, for both XML folders and .tbg files

Check out the Harmony Gaming Software Manual for full details of exporting Harmony data for gaming.

An example of a game engine that you may incor-
porate Harmony data with is Unity. Toon Boom has a Harmony SDK that you may download from the Unity asset store to have control over your character once imported to Unity.

The Harmony Gaming SDK, supports access to skeleton information, drawing information, keyframe animation data, as well as deformations (bones and articulations only), cutters, transparency nodes and timing columns. See below for the link to download the Harmony Gaming SDK to integrate Harmony Gaming and Unity.