Templates and Palettes

Harmony Harmony Support and Troubleshooting
1

Hello,

I’ve been testing out the Harmony software, starting with Essentials to see how it compares to the much more expensive pro version. I built some very simple character rigs, and I noticed the way palettes work in this program creates a considerable hurdle: sometimes two characters apparently match color IDs if they’re made in separate project files and then imported into one project.

For example, I had a scene project file and two characters. A character with blue skin, a character with yellow skin, and a scene with the sun in the background. When I imported the two characters to the scene, my yellow character and the sun turned blue. I searched high and low, and it seems all the answers are pointing to the reality that the palette feature is just broken for Essentials in a fundamental way and you have to buy Pro to work with it.

Even weirder, I made a third simple rig. Each of these characters are no more than three to five colors without outlines, but in this case, the third character’s iris color will turn everyone’s skin and the sun black. However, if I select the palette of another character, it doesn’t change the third character’s iris. What kind of weird space magic is behind Harmony’s palettes? I can’t find any help in any of the tutorials. I would say I can’t believe such a non-intuitive and catastrophic failing would exist, but I’ve worked with Flash. Granted, Flash’s “find and replace” color function appears to be better than your palette system so far, but my heart can’t take more symbol-nested symbols and I really want to like your software.

Is there a way to work around this?

2

Another animator friend of mine figured out the issue. I’ve been at this all day.

It seems the default “vectorized line” always has the same ID in every project, so if I change the color and attempt to use it, it will always create this kind of conflict. None of the other colors in the default palette seem to behave like this. I’m not sure why the third character’s eye wasn’t showing consistent behavior, though.

3

Hi Dawn Somewhere,

As your friend pointed out, this does sound like a colourID issue.
It is recommended not to use the Default palette or colours created in a scene, as the same colourID is created by default for some of them and conflicts such as the ones you have been experiencing can arise when multiple assets are put together in a single scene.

To fix the issue, you could create new colour swatches and repaint the layers with the appropriate colour. I recommend doing this for each of your assets.
Then, bring them back into a scene together and see if you are still having this issue.
If you are, I would ask you to send your scene to support@toonboom.com with a message explaining your issue.

I hope this helps,
Matisse