Keying Layer Properties to switch between puppet views

Harmony Harmony General Discussion
1

Hello, we are a team of five working on a 30 second animation using puppets. We are using Toon Boom Harmony Stage 12.

We have one completed puppet so far but have run into a problem during animation. We have set up the puppet so the different viewpoints are grouped together, eg. the front view head and 3 quarter view head are both connected to a master peg but each have their own master peg as well.

Our intention is to be able to disable/enable the different views during animation. We know that we cannot key activation/deactivation of layers so our alternative method was taking the master peg for the view we want to hide and changing one of its scale values, in the layer properties window, to 0 effectively hiding it from the camera. And to we can do the reverse to bring it back into view. We have tried using this technique to change the viewpoints of the puppet elements; however, we cannot keyframe this.

With animate mode on, keys are not created when the layer properties are changed. When we do create keyframes, through F6 or the transformation tool, the layer properties for that peg become locked (greyed out).

Is there a way to keyframe layer properties, or should we try a different method entirely?

Thanks

2

the reason its grayed out is beause you have a function attached to it. in other words, you have animation happeing to that peg/layer. you can alter these values in the function editor or in the timeline.

i generally like to keep standard poses pushed further down my timeline beyond what I plan on rendering for this purpose. i’ll copy and paste standard poses ( just a head, an entire body, etc) back into place as needed.

another way could be to create a template that you just drag into your project as needed. so if you need to swtich back to the front head, theoretically you could just drag a new front template head back in.