In Harmony 9, Toon Boom has re-engineered its vector technology to deliver a redesigned Pencil Line Technology, providing artists with an uncompromised level of artistic freedom which is both easy-to-use and allows total control.
The following is a list of key aspects of this new technology:
Now you can create Pencil Lines (centre lines) that will capture the pressure information from the digital tablet to produce a simple line which is both easy to work with and to edit.
Artists can now control the Pencil Line Tips by selecting between round, square or free control. Once they have drawn the line, artists can choose what the end or tip of the line will look like.
These new Pencil Lines support texture (pixmap) information that is stamped along the centre of the pencil line, providing unlimited line styles. Artists can either use the wide selection of built-in textures or they can create their own textures by using a pixmap program.
With this new Pencil Line technology, artists can store and create unlimited Pencil Line Styles that can be applied to any Pencil Line in the drawing. This dramatically speeds up the clean-up process as artists can apply a different style with one click. This supersedes the time-consuming process where artists were forced to redraw or manually edit the line.
Harmony 9 now includes a powerful Deformation Technology that enables artists to deform Pixmap Images and Vector Drawings over a period of time.
These deformers can be linked to create a hierarchy of deformations, enabling artists to deform a "single image" and make it move.
There are two main types of deformers:
These allow artists to create a basic skeleton structure in which the parent deformer will move the child deformers. For example: when animating the extremities of a character such as arms or legs, to make the animation look more fluid and natural.
These can be used as a hierarchy similar to the Bones and provide the artist with complete flexibility. For example: when editing curves, artists can deform a straight line into an arc or a zigzag with only a few clicks.
Harmony 9 includes a completely redesigned SDK infrastructure that enables the creation of powerful plug-ins such as the new Particles plug-in. Having particles in Harmony streamlines the production process and provides artists with easy access to predefined special effects like:
More special effects (particles and generic) will be added later. Customers will be notified as soon as these are available.
Harmony 9 offers the first true 3D integration with our 2D flagship animation solution. Artists can import 3D models and 3D scenes into Harmony and manipulate all of their 2D and 3D elements into a unified environment, then render them together. Harmony’s 3D Space goes even further by allowing transformation on all 3 axes and authorizing compositing with external Z buffer sources such as IFF images.
Amazing New Features
