When we are creating puppet-based animations, we end up with a lot of different hands. It would be so nice if there were a Charts panel or part of the library that would show thumbnails of all the drawing substitutions available for a layer all at once. My workaround for this is is to use the UTransform tool that comes installed on the computer when Harmony installs. Here is a tutorial I have made for our team to create thumbnail versions of the tvg files: If you know a better way of doing this, I’d love to hear.
Copy all the tvg files to a folder on your desktop. I made an empty folder called ‘Convert’
Open your Windows Command Prompt. Get to the Convert folder by typing cd desktop\convert
Paste this in the Command Prompt:
utransform -resolution 7680 4320 -bgalpha 0 -outformat PNG4 *.tvg
That converts the Toon Boom tvg files to png
Now open Windows Powershell. Go to your Convert file again by typing cd desktop\convert
Paste this in Windows Powershell:
Dir | Rename-Item -NewName { $_.name -replace “adHandback-”,""}
This is simply to get rid of the long part of the filename that is repetitive. ‘adHandback-’ is the part I wanted to replace with nothing. You may want to repalce ‘inHand-’ or something else.
Now that all the hands are named simply _225, _090 etc. we will run the Photoshop action
I cut and paste all these PNG files from my Convert folder to my DM_Source folder.
I now play my action in Photoshop I’ve created called ‘Batch_CropToPixels_DMSource’
This crops all the hands down to their pixels.
You will notice some of the hands are not complete such as the hands that are holding things. This is because the tvg conversion does not convert the Underlay layer, just the LineArt and ColourArt layers. You have to manually go into the Drawing View in Toon Boom to take screenshots of these hands and save over the cropped png files. In the Drawing View, click the eyeball on the Art Layer panel to Preview all art layers