The more I play around with Harmony, the more I realize it’s an awesome animation software, but when it comes to creating backgrounds or coloring in the frames I have some questions. Am I missing where the art options are for this program or should I create my background art in photoshop or something? I’m trying to create an anime opening and I would like to create nice backgrounds for cities as well as nature settings but I don’t see many brush or artistic options for actual drawing and coloring for a still frame. Same goes for when I add color art to an animation. I know that I can pick a color and use paint fill and also apply a gradient and then add shading art over that…but what about adding rosiness to a character’s cheeks or other countless artistic flares? Thanks for any help!
I love the program for animation/rigs/etc, but i absolutely loathe it for background making. I wish there were a way for it to work like flash for a BG build option with a color wheel that lets you color anything with what you have selected rather than having one color for a pallete item, it adds a ton of time trying to find the right color and add it to pallet insta of insta picking it. If anyone has a better way then i’d love to hear it, right now i also started to sketch out BGs in toonboom and then making them in sai2.
Hmm ok that’s what I was starting to realize with it. This is a great animation program for sure…but for actual art/background design or coloring it seems to be lacking. I have trouble finding a specific color I need as well. I’m not sure what I’m going to do about coloring and shading my characters for the hand-drawn animation, but I think I’m going to try to design and color background settings in photoshop or something. But doing that makes me wonder about vector vs bitmap. Are photoshop drawings only in bitmap? Because if so, then when I import it to toonboom it would get blurry if I ever needed to zoom in on the background
if you have Harmony premium you have access to the texture dual brushes, you have tons of options for making detailed bitmap art, you can make awesome backgrounds in vectors but you have to use a lot of shapes and different colors to make detailed colorful backgrounds, I personally like to use Corel Painter for backgrounds since you can’t beat their natural media simulated digital brushes.
good morning everyone,
Harmony Advanced and Premium both have bitmap layers allowing you to draw with bitmap brushes that are similar to Photoshop.
On bitmap layers, you can change your colour swatch as much as you want, it’s not linked to a colour palette. It will not recolour your background.
http://docs.toonboom.com/help/harmony-14/premium/drawing/about-bitmap-brush.html
Bitmap layers are indeed bitmap and are resolution dependent. Based on your camera move, you have to draw your images big enough.
http://docs.toonboom.com/help/harmony-14/premium/drawing/create-bitmap-brush.html
When you add a new layer, select the Bitmap option.
I hope this helps!
Marie-Eve
Thank you everyone for the comments! This helps a lot!