For the past 6 days straight, all day and most nights I’ve been trying to learn toonboom harmony premium. I’ve never animated before but I’m familiar with programs in general since I edit a lot in after effects. I don’t find it intimating.
However, all of the tutorials I have come across only half-teach. Usually tutorials say ‘how to rig an arm’ or ‘how to move an arm’, ‘how to rig an eyeball’, ‘how to rig a face’ but never how to join them together to form one functioning character. And if it is a tutorial from start to finish its super basic and doesn’t let the character turn its head or body. Both free and paid tutorials are all the same from what I’ve experienced.
Is it because rigging one character literally takes more than a week or does no one want to make a 6 hour long tutorial? I’m not sure how long it takes I really want information on this subject.
Where does everyone learn? I’m learning everything broken which makes my rig broken and I don’t know how to fix it. I’ve tried and failed rigging a character a day now, today I’m up to my 7th redo with no success.
Not one tutorial I have come across so far does anything start to finish, perhaps I am searching in the wrong places?
I’m really ignorant about this software and I want to be informed, if anyone could give me some advice that’d be great for me and I’m sure for others wanting to learn!
I want to learn how to IK rig a cut out character and simple animation in toonboom harmony premium. If possible, from start to finish not leaving out any details. If there’s a tutorial or course I can take, if I need to pay I will be happy to.
It’s just frustrating when I really want to learn but am clueless about it all!
there are hours and hours of tutorials for Harmony, I suggest watching the Harmony 11 tutorials and taking detailed notes and trying out everything the tutorials tell you to do, and then watching the more newer tutorials since they are not as thorough, you will learn the software over time based on the time and effort you put into it, if you are new to animation, read Preston Blair animation book to learn to draw squash and stretch frame by frame, there are many other animation books, when you learn the principles of traditional animation you can better apply what your learned to timing cut-out animation
honestly, 6 days is not alot of time to fully take in what harmony has to offer. i’m a pretty experienced animator and it took me months to really let harmony sink. you need to learn a work flow and that comes from “doing”.
i can rig up a very limited and basic character (that is already designed mind you) in a relatively short period of time now. the time it takes depends on the complexity of the character and any particular design challenges that it may present. a super-easy character with limited motion can be rigged in as quick as 1-2 hours. a more fully robust character with a built up library of drawing substitutions and common angles can take a day or more. again this isnt even taking the actual character design process either. that’s a whole other can of worms.
just keep ticking away at it. like i said you learn from doing. breaking things and then building them again over and over is a part of the learning process. good luck!
