Hello im transitioning from Adobe Flash to Toon Boom Harmony and i realised its not easy to copy a drawing from frame 1 and paste it into frame 2 and for example move it up a little bit , because if i do so it moves the drawing in frame 1 up a little bit. there are some objects i dont need to redraw everything for how would i simply do this like i would in flash ?
Going to bed hope someone can help me , Thanks.
FreshPrince112, I’m not sure which version of harmony you are using, but what you are looking for are pegs. They are sort of similar to symbols, in flash. If you have Harmony premium, open up the node view and look at your blue drawing module. If you select it and then hit control+P, you will make a peg attached to it.
If you don’t have the node view, you can do this in the timeline. Click your drawing, and then click the little plus sign with the arrow next to it in that window, and choose ‘create peg’. (Control+P might work here, I’ve never tried it though.)
This will allow you to give position, scale, and skewing information to your art, without changing the art itself.
There are two ways to manipulate artwork in Harmony. One manipulates the drawing itself, and the other manipulates the symbol of it. If you’re using the black or white arrows to move things around, you are manipulating the raw artwork. Instead, click on the transformation box tool underneath the little yellow running man symbol. You’ll see that your artwork now has a purple hue to it. This lets you know that you are now animating, instead of manipulating your art.
Once you parent up to a peg, the hue will turn yellow, to let you know you are now manipulating a peg.
Using pegs is very much like how you would draw something in Flash, make it a symbol, and then move around and skew that symbol. You’re not changing the position of the art, you’re just changing where that symbol is.
-Continued, apparently.
There are a few things I would recommend you do to your preferences before you go any further, however. Edit>Preferences>general: turn on ‘focus on mouse enter’ and ‘shortcut zooms on mouse’. Focus on mouse enter will allow that little red square that tells you which window is active to just follow around, without you needing to click. If you have any windows torn off and in another monitor, however, you will still need to click. Shortcut zooms on mouse is something I wish wish wish Flash had, because wherever you put your mouse, the zooming will now focus in on that.
In the ‘advanced’ section, turn OFF ‘Animate using animation tools’. This means that you can’t animate on the drawing level, you must have a peg to do so. However, it keeps you from accidentally moving or skewing your raw art, and then wondering why everything looks so off later. It also means you don’t need to remember to parent up twice, when selecting a drawing, to avoid this.
In any drawing module you have already made, ‘animate using animation tools’ is turned on. You can turn it off by clicking (in the node view, not sure how to do this in the timeline) the little post-it note square on the left side of the module, going to advanced, and unclicking ‘animate using animation tools’.
It will save you heart ache, I promise.
-continued again! Argh.
If you’re wanting to frame by frame your animation, like you’ve drawn something and you want to use the same drawing as a base but adjust the arm or whatever, it’s very much like hitting ‘f6’ in flash. You need to make another copy of that frame. I’m not sure what the keyboard shortcut is, I always forget and just click the button that makes a duplicate frame, or blank frame, depending on what I need. Then you can adjust this, and it won’t affect your first frame, because you’ve basically made a new keyframe.
For the last comment, here’s a link to the timeline view that shows how to add a peg:
http://docs.toonboom.com/help/harmony-14/premium/reference/view/timeline-view.html
Just above this is where you would find the duplicate drawing/insert blank drawing buttons, but I can’t remember what they’re called and I can’t open harmony right now. They’re the little white rectangles with an x (blank) and right next to it is the duplicate one.
Hope this makes sense, and hope it helps!
Someone give this man an award, Thank youuuuuuuuu.
A) Not actually a man, and B) You are welcome. 