Script to attach substitute drawings to controls in rig

Harmony Harmony General Discussion
1

Hello Toon Boomers,
I’ve seen this being developed in other programs like Anime Studio Pro, Flash, and now After Effects, where scripts or expressions have been written to attach substitute drawings to controls in a rig. Anime Studio Pro has Smart Bones, you pull the bone/lever one way and substitute drawings are visible with each degree, giving the character the appearance of turning. Recently I saw this video of the animators of the Angry Birds Toons creating this sort of rig in After Effects:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQxD8OOjh-I

Is this possible to do in Harmony? Has anyone wrote a script that can do this? I don’t have experience scripting in Harmony, but I imagine it would mean making an arrow, and when that arrow moves it triggers the substitute drawings to play, or making these objects move across a masked/cutter object.

2

Not sure how powerful the scripting is in Harmony.
Anime Studio Pro has all of it’s tools written in LUA and it reaches into the very depths of the program.
I don’t think Harmony’s scripting can do much more than automation, but I could be wrong. I own Harmony, and use it for many tasks, but for cutout I’ll always use Anime Studio Pro. It’s powerful LUA scripting is one of the main reasons.