Replacing drawings by changing path to file.

Harmony Harmony General Discussion
1

Hi,

This may be a rookie question, but can a a drawing be replaced (for example a background) by simply changing the path to the element and changing the name? So that no manual manipulation to get the positions/rotation/scale is needed. When I go in Network, select a drawing, and check it’s layer properties, under drawing, I see a path but can’t change it.

Much thanks,
Joeri

2

Hi THUR,

The drawing path is read-only.

Do you have a specific example as why you would want to do that? There might be a different feature for it.

Maybe timing columns could be something useful for you.

http://docs.toonboom.com/help/harmony-14/premium/timing/use-timing-column.html?Highlight=timing%20column

Marie-Eve

3

I agree, it would be very handy to be able to do this. In OpenTOonz an animation asset can be easily pointed to another asset at any time, which is very simple and really handy to have - and the transformation keys/positioning/rotation/scale are kept intact. The timing columns require too much preparation in advance, in my opinion. Besides this, often it is handy to be able to duplicate a column, and just replace the contents for a second object to follow the same animation.

Or duplicating the entire scene, and pointing the assets to different ones (for example, showing the same animation in different seasons, or different backgrounds). Changing the paths to point to other assets makes this very, very simple to achieve. An alternative option in OpenTOonz is to replace (parts) of an asset with another. Similar in scope, yet slightly different in approach.

Anyway, it would simplify certain tasks.

4

Hi Thur,

I discussed with a colleague:

“You could make your positioning and animation on a parent peg, then if you import a different background you connect the new node to the same peg and voila, instant position. The background resides in your scene, so if you move it to another machine there is no danger of absolute path not working.
If you don’t want to have the bg in your scene then you Import> Link to image to a folder where you put many bgs named like this prefix-#.extention for example bg-bluekitchen.tga, bg-sunnykitchen.tga, bg-305.tga, etc. This way you just have to type the suffix of the bg in the xsheet cell and you get the proper bg. Of course this would not work if absolutely need the paths to be different.”

I hope this helps!

Marie-Eve