adding a stroke/contour in Harmony Essentials seems to be impossible

Hi,

I’m doing a trial of the software and I can’t work out how to add a stroke to a shape.
If I use the brush tool, I can press K in the Drawing view and see a 0 size stroke. But I can’t change it to any other size.
Is there a solution to this? If not, how do you go about making shapes using the brush tool and then adding an outline? Adding a layer, scaling it down and flattening does not give an even (or easily controllable) outline.

Thanks for any help.

OK, here is what I’m trying to do:
I have shape I’ve drawn with the brush tool.
I now want to give that shape an outline with a different colour.
How? I can see the zero width stroke. I have to tools to increase it’s size from zero.

  1. Select the shape.
  2. Show Strokes
  3. Convert Strokes to Pencil Lines
  4. You can now adjust the line weight with the Minimum slider in the Tool Properties window.
  5. With a visible line you can select a line and change its color by clicking on a colour swatch.

That all is fine, and I’ve tried that. But at point 3, I select the shape, and I can see the blue outline of the stroke in Drawing mode. I select “Convert Strokes to Pencil Lines” and nothing seems to happen. The Tool Properties do not update to give me the option of changing pencil width.

Is this a bug in the trial version or something? Or is it not available in Essentials?

In Harmony a stroke IS a zero width line so all is normal.

It’s not clear what you are doing or why you require an outline.
What about making one using the pencil too set to a very thin
width or using a transparent colour? If you’re having trouble
seeing the stroke, go into the Menu-View-Show-Show Strokes
(without this you won’t be able to see the stroke after making it).

try this one:
-select the shape in the drawing view with the black arrow
-press shift+F12

it will add a stroke with the selected colour in the palette.
this comand is also available under: drawing > convert > Strokes to Pencil Lines

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Hi,

The keyboard shortcut didn’t work, but the command from the drop down menu did. Thanks for that, that’s a relief. Is there any known reason why the context sensitive menu and the shortcut keys aren’t working on my machine? Did you have the same problem on yours?

Hi berbank, according to this link shift+F12 is the correct shortcut.
http://docs.toonboom.com/download/harmony/7.8/harmony_stage_keyboardshortcuts.pdf
I can’t help you on "the context sensitive menu, i know it works both in drawing view and camera view.
About shortcut, Are you using a laptop?
maybe you can customize the comand with another shortcut and see if it works.

Hi, I’ve checked and in the Trial version of Essentials anyway, there doesn’t seem to be an entry for ‘Convert Strokes to Pencil Lines’. So I can’t even assign it a shortcut. I am using a Laptop yes.

first off this is pretty great! never knew you could do this…and here’s why.

if i select a shape with the Select Tool as described, Stokes to Pencil Lines is GRAYED out in the Drawings/Convert menu. HOWEVER if i hit the keyboard shortcut of shift+F12 it does indeed add a pencil line around a selected shape despite the fact that option is not available to me…

im positive in the past i’ve hunted around looking for a way to do this and since that option was not available to me i never thought to actually just try to associated keyboard shortcut.

good tip!

the big take away from this is that you HAVE to be in the Drawing view… Stokes to Pencil Lines is grayed out in the camera view… I couldn’t add a stroke in camera view… only in drawing.