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
Since all exported image from Harmony is being flattened, the only way to export as you want is exporting each layer by disabling others one by one but this could be a tedious workaround. If you only had Harmony Premium, this could be done quickly by using a script which adds write nodes under each read node and then export them together at the same time.
What script is that?
First of all, this only will work with Harmony Premium. Also, you need to know how to enable and use the script in Harmony Premium but it will not be that difficult using it. And I just have realized that you want the SWF file. For SWF, the only way to export is File>Export>SWF. So the script below will not export SWF but other bitmap formats such as TGA, PSD or PDF that you can import it to Illustrator.
If you still want to know about the script, here is more information.
https://docs.toonboom.com/help/harmony-16/premium/scripting/scripting-reference.html?Highlight=script
And here is the script that you can import. Or directly create it from Script Editor by copying and pasting it if you want
https://fileshare.toonboom.com/wl/?id=vJP1RI6WhuEmhBXL55QOfhWihCcza7u5
Basically, when you run, it will ask you where you want to save the files and name of job and scene to create subfolders. The file names will be based on the layer name.
Default file format is TGA4 which contains the alpha backgrounds but you can change it to other formation by editing the line below (TGA4) in line 77.
node.setTextAttr(writeNodePath, “DRAWING_TYPE”, 0, “TGA4” );