Creating backgrounds in harmony can be extremely annoying due to having to make a pallete for every single color thats used in it. In flash making backgrounds was far easier/faster as you could just click the color wheel, pick color and get painting with vectors.
There should be a way to turn off the color id mode and let you free paint a background with vector colors.
Palettes are very powerfull for animated elements as they allow you to change the element’s colours by modifying the palette colour, whithout having to repaint every element, drawing instance by drawing instance.
But for colour research, background- or illustration- colouring they are very counter intuitif.
Funny thing. What I said can be done in toonboom storyboard, albeit without the ability to do masks or cutters to nest stuff (like a bitmap layer on top of vector for toonboom shading).
I’m likely gonna do my bgs in storyboard, export out to toonboom and re-assmble/bitmap there.
I created a scene with 3 drawing layers and new palette containing 3 colors.
On every drawing layer I created a drawing and painted it with one of the three colors.
The drawing of the first drawing layer is painted in blue, second one in red and the third one in yellow.
In the Node View I selected the first drawing node (the blue one) and created a template from it.
In Windows Explorer, I went to the ‘palette-library’ folder of the Template’s directory and removed the ‘.plt’ files containing the color value information of all the colors that are part of the palette.
Back to Harmony, I imported the templated. Harmony informs me that it could not find the colour of my blue drawing element and asks le if I want it to recover the color.
Once the color recover process finished, Harmony recreated the initial color palette containing the blue color.
But, the new palette only contains the blue color! It doesn’t know that the initial palette contained 2 more other colors.
Ok, what does this mean? This means that the color value information are stored within the .tvg drawing file as well.
Which makes me think that, in terms of development, it might be quite easy to implement the possibilty to use palette independent colors.
The only additional information that the .tvg file would have to contain is if the color needs to look at a palette or not.
Interesting find. And yea that makes a lot of sense since it works real time in storyboard which shares the core engine with harmony, so there must be a way to do this.