In Adobe after effects, you can set up constant random movement. an example might be an earring which you can set to always have subtle winging movement going on.
I have a character I want to have those elements. occasional and slight movement of the wings and tail (it’s a dragon, just for those of you who need to visualize) While I don’t really need them to be animated in general, some subtle computer driven movement would be nice.
Does harmony have such a feature?
You can think of Harmony’s node system as analogous to cooking recipe ingredients. Once you understand what different things do and what is required to achieve certain results you can come up with your own recipes/formulas beyond the most obvious applications.
I have no experience with this but with experimentation you might be able to utilize the Quake node. This node can be used to create a camera shake effect. If you have any experience generating this effect or if you imagine how that could be achieved you may be able to see the possibilities. You might attach it to a drawing layer, peg or group instead of a camera. It has a Random Seed parameter and many other fields for various options.
Harmony also supports Open FX:
nope, everything has to be deliberately cycled, keyframed, repeated. might be able to rig up some clever IK solution but harmony still doesn’t have much of a secondary/physical animation engine beyond working with deforms and IK rigging. i’m still quite in the dark about the harmony scripting capabilities and the advanced “functions” that can be applied to drawing and layer parameters, but those may give you some clever options too (would require programming experience and research into poorly-documented, mysterious aspects of harmony, yourself).
still, you’d think given the cost of the software and the self-professed “industry leader” status, this’d be an included feature. especially once you realize that pretty much every other animation tool (AE [with one of many plugins], spine, creature/midas, moho, the list goes on…) has a physics engine or a “motor” method for setting up these sorts of dynamic and automatic animations. i’m also really wanting a “real” animatable mesh warping engine (again, like the each of the above-mentioned animation tools now provides.)
i’m pretty sure openFX plugins would only provide rendered, rasterized visual effects, not actually influence core transformation parameters of toonboom drawings. i could be mistaken, but i don’t think that OFX nodes would feed back control data into the harmony network, only rendered results.
This.
I think the easiest solution would be to pre animate a few movements on your rig, then paste them where you want them in the scenes.
The only follow through nodes I’ve seen were custom built nodes in a high-end studio.