Having trouble with importing images and vectorising them

Harmony Harmony Support and Troubleshooting
#1

Hi everyone !

I hope I’m posting in the right section… If not, sorry !

So, I’m helping my boyfriend who’s in animating school. Sorry in advance for my lack of vocabulary, I don’t know how to animate, I just know very basic things. He has to make a 2D animated movie with his schoolmates and I’m trying to help him a bit since this is a lot of work.

The things I do are quite basic and easy for me : I colorize the drawings in Toon Boom. He prepares all the things like placing the drawings and all, placing the dots to clean the line and then I just have to colorize everything by using the paint bucket. I wanted to help him more but he told me that to do so, I will have to prepare the line by placing the little dots (this is the thing like in Illustrator, like vectorizing thing and all). So I asked him if Toon Boom didn’t have a feature that allows you to import your png drawings and vectorizing it by placing all the little dots around. He told me that he didn’t know, so I made some research and found that you could. We were happy and all since it would save him a lot of time but we realised that it was not what we were expecting. In fact vectorising it was juste placing dots all around the lines of the drawing, I mean the contour/the outline. What he needs is that the dots overlap with the drawing’s line. Is this even possible ? I guess it could be, if the software manages to contour the lines, it would just have to make the middle of the contour, right ?

I hope I made myself clear, if not I’m sorry and I’ll try to explain with more details. I couldn’t join pictures so I upload them, here’s the link to help you understand the difference between what we get and what we need !
https://imgur.com/DZ2SACY
https://imgur.com/ptUxzri
Thanks a lot and have a good night/day !

#2

Which edition of the software are you using? I assume animation is not made in Harmony but on another software? If you’re not using Essentials, which only supports one sublayer, when you import and vectorize drawings* (like PNG, PSD, etc.) you get a black line on the LINE ART sublayer and an invisible line on the COLOUR ART sublayer. The invisible line (which should be visible by default, if you don’t see anything press K to show strokes) will be created based on the centre of the line art. That is, if you paint on the Line Art layer, the paint border will be exterior to the contour, but if you paint on the Colour Art layer the border will go up to the centre of the line. Hope I understand what you meant and this helps.

See the example on this quick test with a doodle made outside Harmony and then imported:

http://sn.grogue.org/lcanau/animation/img/TB_lineArt.png
http://sn.grogue.org/lcanau/animation/img/TB_colourArt.png

The red arrow indicates Line Art is selected and the green arrow indicates Colour Art is selected, though since preview is activated we’re seeing both sublayers together, but you can see how the strokes (invisible blue lines that define the borders to paint) are different.

  • I’m assuming you already know how to do this. Drawings should be over white background as if they were drawn on a piece of paper and you should choose in Import options Convert to Toon Boom Vector Drawing and on Vectorization Black and White if you want black line or Grey if you have a pencil or rough-like art (just note that the less clean the line is the more issues might arise with the vectorization and the creation of a clear and close line on the Colour Art layer).

–
Luis Canau