Modules
Character Design with Harmony Advanced and Premium
Activity 4: Tracing the Character

Activity 4: Tracing the Character

T-DES-001-010

When your rough models are ready, it is time to clean and ink them. You can still use the default palette and colours to do so, especially if you are not the one doing the colour styling. If you have already created a palette for your model, you can add new colours for tracing.

If you want to keep your roughs and sketches, add a new drawing layer and trace in it using the Light Table. This is the equivalent of adding a sheet of paper and tracing over the rough using the animation disk light table. You only need to disable the rough layer to prevent it from appearing in the final scene render.

Material

You can download the provided sample material for this module and use the following templates to use as a reference to compare with your final sketch. Don't forget to unzip (uncompress) the files before placing them in your library.

MO-DES-001/04-bear-clean.tpl
MO-DES-001/04-orcus-clean.tpl

How to trace the character

Start Harmony.

Open your CharacterDesign project.

In the Timeline view, add a new drawing layer and call it Clean.
If you work in the Drawing view, enable the Light Table or press Shift + L.

You should hide all the unnecessary layers and keep only the Sketch and Clean layers visible. Do not hesitate to lock the Sketch layer!

Select the Brush tool and pick a black colour from the Colour view. Customize your brush with the Tool Properties view if needed.

In the Timeline view, select the first cell of the Clean layer.

In the Camera view, start tracing the character.

NOTE: Remember that you can use the Rotary table to turn your workspace around.

To make perfect points and corners, you can intersect the two strokes to create a point. Using the Cutter tool, you can automatically trim the excess portion. In the Tool Properties view, enable the Lasso selection type. Make sure the Use Mouse Gesture button is enabled. In this mode, you can automatically delete any extra sections of line in your artwork by simply clicking, holding and dragging your mouse over it.

If you are using the Pencil tool to clean your drawing, you will need to merge your pencil lines together after cropping the points.

In the Tools toolbar, select the Select tool.

In the Camera or Drawing view, select the two strokes to be merged.

In the Tool Properties view, click the Merge Pencil Lines button.

You can also set the Join option to Mitre.

Once you are comfortable using the Drawing tools, you can improve your line art using the Contour Editor tool. In the Drawing Tools toolbar, select the Contour Editor tool.
Pull on the Bézier handle. Both point’s handles will move as one.
If you drew with pencil lines, in the Tools toolbar, select the Pencil Editor tool located in the Contour Editor menu.
In the Camera or Drawing view, select a pencil line and click the line to reshape it.