Activity 2: Preparation and Preferences

T-HFND-009-015

Get set up with this project introduction and adjust preferences, such as Default Separate Position, Focus on Mouse Enter, Double-click Opens Editor, Onion Skin Render Style and Reduce Indentation.

Material

To complete this topic, you will need the following from the sample material you downloaded:

  • MO-HFND-009/07-camera-multiplane scene

Video Transcript

Hello everyone and welcome to this tutorial. This is Matisse, trainer here at Toon Boom. I come from a Traditional Animation background. And then I've worked on a couple productions, mostly as a rigger, but also as a character turnaround artist. I've done animation on games and I've also worked on animated advertisements.

In this tutorial, we are going to learn how to set up elements of the scene at different depths, in the Z-axis. We're going to learn how to animate your camera and how to move your animation inside that 3D space that you just created and have it interact with background elements. We will end up with the final result where the elements of our scene overlap one another and don't retain the exact same position in relation to the camera, which will give a much more realistic feel to your scene, rather than static.

Now before we jump into this, let's go over some useful Preference settings that you'll want to activate before working.

So let's head to the Stage > Preferences. If you are a Windows user, you'll ind this under the Edit menu. And let's go up to the General tab. Ok so the preferences that you'll want to have activated is: Default Separate Position for Pegs. You'll also want to have Focus on Mouse Enter. And Shortcut Zooms on Mouse. So this will allow you to toggle between your different windows in Harmony and have your shortcuts work on the window that you're hovering on without having to click on it. Then we're going to go into the Node view and have the Double Click on a Node Opens the Editor activated. So this will allow you to access the Layer Properties, without having to click on the yellow box. You'll just be able to double-click on the node. We'll go into that later. You may also want to note that, if you're not on the Premium version of Harmony, you won't have access to that tab.

Let's head to the Drawing tab now. And we're going to change the Onion Skin Render Style. So let's put it to Outline Only. I'll show you a demonstration of that later.

And last thing, we're going to go to the Timeline and we're going to check the Reduce Indentation, which allows you to see the names of your layers closer together, by reducing the angle of the diagonal on the left side of the timeline.

All right, well let's get started then!

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Time Estimated 10 mins

Difficulty Level Beginner

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