How does Harmony’s bitmap tools fare against TVPaint’s or OpenToonz’s?
Can you guys name shows or films that make use of Harmony’s bitmap brush, especially for character animation?
I’m curious as to how professionals would make use of it since most of the shows(mostly cartoons) I’ve seen seems mostly vectorized like the Tangled series. Can Harmony give that organic hand-drawn aesthetic in its animations?
At least part of “Buñuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles” was animated in TVPaint , see this reel:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMtmT5ReiEE
As is often the case, productions use multiple software packages.
Not a big fan of the art style of those two recent films you mentioned.
I do, however, like your ‘Final Call’ work. It reminds me of the old Looney Tunes cartoons which inspires a great deal of my ideas.
If I just wanted a simple frame by frame raster workflow then maybe TVPaint is a better choice. It’s just that I’m also interested in Harmony’s color switching, tweening, cutter, etc. I feel like they’ll speed up the process a lot.
Harmony can achieve an organic hand-drawn look, but its brushes are not as sophisticated has those in TVPaint, which is specialized in hand-drawn animation. I don’t know about OpenToonz.
I don’t know about feature films using bitmap brushes in Harmony. Recent films made in Harmony that come to mind are “Tito and the Birds” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aMR9dWWar0) and “Funan” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xr8hMKCYTnw). Not sure if “Tito” used any sort of bitmap brushes in terms of the character animation. Maybe a bit of textures mixed. Most commonly the organic, more sophisticated look is saved for the backgrounds, while characters have to be animated in more practical ways.
I worked in a number of short films with character animation using Harmony with bitmap brushes. Here’s a few trailers with different character designs:
FINAL CALL
https://vimeo.com/182292665
(backgrounds made in third-party software)
RATIO BETWEEN TWO VOLUMES
https://vimeo.com/237726475
(some elements, like textures, made in third-party software)
BECAUSE THIS IS MY CRAFT
https://vimeo.com/260792667
(probably 100% done in Harmony)
While TVPaint undoubtedly has more sophisticated brushes I think the advantage over Harmony is more in terms of artistic painting, not really in terms of the character lines. If you’re doing just hand-drawn animation it probably makes more sense financially also - especially if you get the standard TVPaint edition, not the Professional one. With Harmony you’re paying for vector, bitmap, hand-drawn and cut-out animation with complex rigging, besides pretty decent compositing tools. Don’t know much about the compositing options in TVPaint (only in the Professional edition), but the camera has no comparison whatsoever with Harmony’s.
I saw recently “Buñuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles” (a Spanish/Dutch co-production), which I forgot to mention but I’d seen it featured on the Toon Boom reel 2018. I thought I should add it to the thread.
Spanish trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiNVO5IG1os
US trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWm5exhStVs
I assume it was all animated in Harmony. It has a thin pencil-like organic line which should be bitmap (or textured vector).