I’m trying to color up a character and add built in shading and highlights to the various pieces and an issue that I’m looking to resolve is how to change the depth sorting of different colored elements within the same drawing layer. I’m coming from an Adobe Flash / Illustrator background so I have the feelings that I’m just missing something about how to accomplish this in Toon Boom. In Illustrator you could see a big stack of all the little elements that made up your image and you could click and drag those elements up or down in the stack to have them appear above other elements with the shortcut key being CTRL + [ or ]… but I can’t find out yet how to accomplish the same thing in Harmony.
In the example below I have two gradient pencil lines that I want to adjust so that the white hilight area is on top of the black shadowed gradient line. I want to keep all of the colored elements on the discreet color art layer on the drawing so that I can reserve the underlay and overlay layers for other purposes. How do I go about doing this?
Thanks!
I think I understand your question and you’re looking for the arrange functions CMD UP, to bring forward, CMD down, to send backwards, Shift + CMD UP to bring to the front, Shift+CMD Down to send all the way to the back, that’s the hot Keys, also if you select your element you can right click on it and in the pop up menu you can highlight arrange and see those functions there. Tip: when drawing elements in the same drawing layer, draw them one at a time and group them “CMD G”, if you dont you can run in to the problem of selecting an elements fill, or line individually, and when they start to overlap, its hard to select the one element you want, plus it helps so much when its time to distribute layers for rigging and animating
Oh yeah!! That’s just what I was looking for and your comment about right clicking on the element brought up a host of other information about tools and shortcut designations that I hadn’t known how to access either, so wow… treasure trove of information! Grouping stuff sounds like a useful bit as well although I’ve been creating character elements on specific discreet drawing layers to keep things organized that way from the start, but I like your thinking as grouping things on a single layer and then distributing them to their respective place in the timeline hierarchy sounds like a more efficient workflow.
Brilliant… thank you!
Yeah there is no one way to do it, but for me I like to draw my character in full, on one drawing layer, I will group all the main parts like the head, the torso, the legs, the feet, the hands, the arms, even the little bits, like the jacket, the collar, the tie,. then I will repeat the same process, on the next frame, but different view, so from front view to quarter front view, then the side and as far as I want to take it. Then when it’s time to build the rig, everything is grouped up I can easily select, cut and paste, and go from there.
If you are working in the node view, you could use the layer selector node for this as well
