Question about pegs

Harmony Harmony General Discussion
1

Hi, i was looking in all the oficial tutorials about how to animate with peg, but they never explain why.

what are the pros to animate with pegs? because the cons are a lot! in the timeline and in the network you have a lot of more layers and nodes! and they are really annoying!

Thanks!

2

Quote from Lilly from Toon Boom:
“To answer the question of why use Pegs, another reason here is that sometimes you might want to squash or stretch one element, without affecting the child elements. If you want to, for example, squash the upper arm, without squashing the lower arm, then you can’t do this if everything is connected in a direct hierarchy. If you do use pegs instead, then you could go back on the drawing layer itself and do the squash and stretch.”
Quote ends:

3

thanks for the answer nolanscott!!!

i already ear that reason, but thats the only reason? because i prefer make the squash and stretch in other way but dont have all the pegs in the timeline!!!

4

  • You keep your work organized and tidy by separating drawings from translations applied to the drawings (you switch drawings on the drawing layers, and apply translations only on the pegs);

  • You can have a hierarchy of pegs and pegs with alternate translations, enabling or disabling the peg you want to use, preserving the original drawing position/scale;

  • You can group different drawings or sub-pegs under a single peg;

  • If something goes wrong or you change your ming you can just delete the peg and restart because you have your drawing with all of it’s original values of position, scale, etc.

In the end, if you don’t need any of this, you can keep it simple and don’t use pegs at all.

5

If you’re working purely hand-drawn in harmony, you probably won’t need pegs very often, if ever. They work in a Shift-and-Trace kind of way, to use a traditional animation term.

But if you are doing cut-out animation, they are absolutely, without question, indispensable. As was answered already, pegs give you a hierarchy (lower leg controls the foot, upper leg controls the lower leg, lower body controls the upper leg, body controls the lower body, etc.) which makes your rig, your timeline, your network, and your animation more organized and simplified. Yes it adds more nodes to your network and more lines to your timeline, but they actually do simplify things drastically. I turn off the option to animate drawings when I work cut-out, because animating the drawings is actually really annoying.

I’m not exaggerating when I say I cannot imagine anyone producing watchable cut-out animation without the use of pegs.

6

pegs are awesome and are indispensable… however i don’t like using a peg on every drawing layer. i find that too cumbersome. that’s me though.

7

i create this other post that have to do with this:

https://forums.toonboom.com/toon-boom-harmony/general-discussion/mixing-cut-out-and-traditional-animation

but no one seems to respond it

8

Thanks all for the answers.

i understand the use and the importance of pegs. but do not deceive ourselves, the pegs in the timeline and in the network are really annoying, they dont make the things simple.

and, why they no put a button to desactivate the “animate using animation tools”? and modify the “apply embebbed pivot on parent peg”? i see in a official tutorial that they make with script, WHY??? why not put 2 simply buttons for that!

i mix the cut out animation with a LOT of frame by frame animation. and there is when the pegs make the things a little more complicated.

thanks all and I take this opportunity to wish you all Merry Christmas and New Year!!!

9

You can do things simpler or complicated according to your necessities. On collaborative/studio work someone will do the rigging before the animation and someone else will do the compositing after the animation. So animators can animate without thinking about pegs or even looking at the network, they’d just move the puppets on the camera view and add or remove KFs on the timeline. It would be similar in tradigital. But even more simpler is in traditional animation where the animator doesn’t even need to use the software.

You can deactivate the “animate using animation tools” on the advanced preferences if you normally work with pegs. Currently you can choose where to apply the pivots manually or via scripting toolbar which ends up being a “button” anyway :slight_smile: If you select all your drawings/pegs you can apply the pivot on the pegs with one single click.

10

Thanks Icanu!

and the tip of deactivate the animate using animation tools in the advanced preferences its really helpful!!!