I have been using Toon Boom Harmony Essential for a month or 2 now making characters for a web series im creating, and very sadly only just realized i can not import my characters with seperate layers into Adobe AE to do the final animation. I am currently very very stressed out and im wondering if i can export my TBH characters, retaining all their seperate layers, and transfer them into photoshop so that i can then export them from photoshop and into Adobe AE? I do not believe Toon Boom Harmony has all the neccessary tools that I need to fully animate the series im creating which is why I was using it as a paint program to create the characters and not completely animating within it. Any and all help is appreciated, I am afraid to work on my porject anymore in the case that theres no way of me fixing the problem ive created. If its any help, TBH essentials can export the following files: TGA, SGI, PSD, YUV, PAL, PNG, BMP, OPT, TIF, dpx, PDF, SWF, and MOV
I can’t for the life of me understand what it is you are wanting to animate that you feel Harmony cannot do and AE can? I love AE, but for character animation it leaves much to be desired. Adding the DUIK plugin helps a bit but not much. Harmony has a huge set of tools for animation, even in Essentials, that simply don’t exist in AE so I’m lost. That being said, if you feel you really must export your character out you can make a movie for every layer and then import them into AE. That is extremely painful and every export you do will have a composition the size of your export not the size of your data so you will need to import and then resize every composition. If you are on a Mac it is a tad easier but you could export every animated character not the components as a .mov file as it supports transparency and leave your background out. Import that into AE and place it in it’s own composition. Now make a selection around the boundary extents of the character and crop the composition to those data extents. Then animate the character with something like the puppet tool. Or… please explain in better detail what exactly you are trying to do in Harmony that you feel cannot be done thus your desire to export to AE? Giving a list of Harmony exports does not help anyone help you. We all know what it exports, that’s in the manual. What are you trying to do? Lastly, if you really feel you must have AE to animate then having an step in the middle using Harmony looks like a waste of time. Draw you characters in Photoshop and animate in AE exclusively and don’t use Harmony in between.
If using AE for animation and need to rebuild characters, I would recommend using Illustrator over Photoshop to create vector art that way you have more freedom with the camera in AE. You can zoom way in on them and never have pixel issues.
That being said now that your characters are built out in harmony, why not give the harmony animation tools a try? You have nothing to lose, only to gain!