fade in and out

I am using Toon Boom Harmony Essentials and I have a simple task that is proving to be more frustrating than thought. I want a simple fade in from black and a simple fade to black. I have seen multiple posts about this, but none of them seem to be helping, I have tried the transparent effect as well as the colour scale with no success. If theres anywhere I can be referred to or there is something very simple I am overlooking this would be very much appreciated, thanks!

I normally do my fades afterwards in the edit, but to do it directly in Harmony you could make a layer with a black square that just covers the whole frame over the top of the scene, and then keyframe the transparency effect to go from 0% (for full black at the start of the fade) to 100% (at the end of the fade.) That should do the trick. :slight_smile:

Back when I had Animate 3 which is equivalent to Harmony Essentials now, I would guess, I used to use the Colour-Card. It doesn’t seem like an obvious thing to do but it cuts out a bunch of steps over creating a black square, making sure it covers the scene, etc.

Here is how you do it. Add a Colour-Card, it doesn’t matter where it is in the timeline in terms of layer order, leave it where it is by default.

In the settings for the Colour Card, the layer properties, there is a Z offset and it should say 12 B. If you type in 12 F, it moves the Color-Card in front of everything, covering your scene. Since the Colour-Card goes off into infinity in each direction you don’t have to worry about it not covering all of your scene.

Then click the color and change it to black. Set a keyframe for the alpha to 0, this will make your scene appear again, the Colour-Card is there but transparent, then set another keyframe and change the alpha back to 255, the Colour-Card becomes fully black covering your scene. Then just move those keyframes to where you want the fade in/fade out to occur.

There was even a way that I had used masks to make more fancy transitions using the Colour-Card, I will try and find some examples. I am using Harmony Premium now so it is hard to remember how I had set that up without using the Node View.

I did find the transitions that I made with the Colour-Card and Masks but it is in Animate 3 and I can’t open those files.

I saved them as templates once I had them established, there was Fade In, Fade Out, Radial Wipe, Spotlight in, Spotlight Out, Vertical Blinds, Wipe Bottom, Wipe Left, Wipe Right. Whenever I needed a transition I just dragged it from the Library and was good to go.

Here is a quick tutorial I did for somebody, can’t remember now, it was 4 years ago and I use Animate Pro 2 but it should still be relevant for Harmony Essentials. I do go into the Node View but the layers and timeline should give you enough info. The first half of the video covers using a rectangle and transparency and the second part covers using the Colour-Card method.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/17397453/ftb_desktop.mp4

For anyone reading the thread Animate is more like Advanced than Essentials. :slight_smile:

Well, I know it can get confusing, with all of the different branding of Harmony. When I first used Animate it did not have the new bone deformer yet and there was no node view, I did not have 4 sub layers for every drawing and the number of effects was limited. You had to set up the effects in the timeline and put them in the proper order with the Layers. In this regard isn’t the Animate that I was using closest to Essentials now?

I do think that maybe the best thing Toon Boom could do is just have two versions of Harmony, Essentials and Premium. To have three versions is just really confusing and frustrating for users when they are trying to learn from tutorials.

Haha…if you provide your backstory maybe Essentials but without it only old timers like you would see it.

I think more people are happy with Advanced and Premium.

Essentials is offered to people who want a taste but are not ready to or cannot afford to invest so much time and money.

Okay, so I made a transparent effect layer, made a black box that covered the whole screen it’s child, set it to zero after clicking the plus sign, then going to where the fade ends and set it to 0, its still not working. I tried it in render view, and viewed it as a sfw, this is beyond frustrating since I have literally done everything that every tutorial on the subject has said, there has to be something I’m missing.

Is there anyway you can post a screenshot of your timeline, the layers?

One thing I would be curious to rule out is if you can get the fade to black to work with just a fresh, simple scene. Start a new scene, just have a circle and then draw the black rectangle over it and animate the transparency of it. If it works and renders out then that may mean there is something at odds with your other scene. Hard to say but I would try and see if the transparency effect works with a fresh simple scene first and go from there and begin to rule things out.

Okay, the problem was fixed, a simple mistake, I made the black screen the child of the effect when it was actually the other way around, gah I feel stupid now! Thanks loads for all the info though guys, this community is cert efficient and effective.

Oh, we have all been there! I have moments like this all the time. Glad you got it worked out.