When I use the mouse to move a peg layer up and left with the Animate and Transform buttons active, a keyframe is added to every property of Position, Rotation, Scale and Skew. I’d like it better if it simply added one keyframe to the X and Y positions in that example. I could imagine this feature being located in Preferences\Advanced\Advanced Options\ and being called “Restrict Keyframes to Changed Properties”
Another idea: I’d love it if I could lock or completely remove layer properties I don’t want to animate. For example: In my character rig, I have a layer called ShirtCollar. I cloned it (ShirtCollar-1) and put the back part of the collar on the Underlay sublayer. I attach pegs to both of these layers to avoid keyframing anything directly on the art. I attach a parent peg (ShirtCollar-PegParent) to both of them so they will both move together if I want them to move, skew, scale, etc. For the child peg ShirtCollar-Peg, I simply want to animate z-depth. I don’t want to accidentally animate any other property of that peg.
Howdy, you can limit what properties are keyframed when moving that peg.
If you go to Preferences/Camera/ and then in that first area named Tools, you will see a box checked named Set Keyframes on all Functions with the Transform Tool. You want to uncheck this box, hit okay and then close Harmony and start it back up.
Then when you move the peg up and to the left, you should only see keyframes for the X and Y, and the rotation, scale and skew will be left alone.
I prefer to leave it checked and have keyframes generated for the other properties because it can get tricky and cause more work if you are not diligent.
Say we take a drawing of a square and attach it to a peg. Then we go to frame 10 and move the peg up and to the left, then at frame 20 we rotate it 45 degrees and then at frame 30 we scale it down 50%. With Harmony automatically key framing all of the properties the animation runs predictably how I expect it to.
But… if we have that checkbox turned off then we have to be real careful about key framing the start of that 45 degree rotation and the start of that scaling to 50%. If I at frame 20 rotate the peg 45 degrees, it will start the rotation from the very first frame. What I intended was to have it start rotating from frame 10 and finish at frame 20, so I have to go in and manually set a keyframe at frame 10 and when I do the scaling I have to put in a keyframe at frame 20, so that it scales down to 50% by frame 30.
Now, maybe this is what you want and desire, but for me I prefer to have the automatic key framing done because I just feel like it is less work and less danger of something going wrong. Not because of any fault with Harmony but because I forgot to set a starting keyframe.
Perfect! Thank you so much for telling me about that preference checkbox!