New Features in Harmony 17

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Harmony 17’s improved animation tools include rigging, compositing and effects features to make production efficient — and exceptional. It offers students, freelancers and independents artists access to the same powerful tools studios rely on daily.

Here are some of the features you will be covering in this course. Let's get started!

Stabilizer Tool

Interested in drawing smoother lines and curves alongside sharper angles? Harmony 17 includes a new Stabilizer tool which creates an optional trail between the pen input and the brush stroke with two modes: average and pulled string. The Average stabilizer mode trails the stroke along with the pen’s input, reducing jitter; Pulled String allows artists to pull the brush stroke, allowing for more precision when drawing sharp angles. Both stabilizers reduce natural shakes and inconsistencies when drawing, and allow for more control over the end result.

Adjustable Pen Pressure Sensitivity

You can have more control over the pen input than ever with adjustable pen pressure in Harmony 17. By adjusting the curve for pen pressure input, users can make adjustments that allow them to draw more expressively, get more line variation with less pressure or position their pens without making unintended marks.

Tilt Sensitivity and Pen Rotation

Brush strokes get an added hand-drawn feel with Harmony 17’s Tilt Sensitivity and Pen Rotation. Change the shape, pen tilt and rotation of your brush while drawing and create flawless line art and calligraphy when using styluses that offer tilt and rotation data.

Curvilinear Perspective Guides

Bring a fresh point of view to your drawing tools with new adjustable perspective guides, making for more precise camera pans, panoramas, true-to-life scenes and an expansive, cinematic look — all while helping you stay on-deadline by being more efficient. Curvilinear drawing guides have curving perspective lines with scenes that feature continuous 3-point, 4-point and 5-point (fisheye) perspectives, large-panning backgrounds and more.

Free Form Deformer Node

New to Harmony 17 Premium, the Free Form Deformer Node helps you animate in any style — stylishly! Animate patterns and textures on fabric faster than ever so you can give characters checkered clothes with confidence. Place points that can be moved and manipulated to stretch and warp assets, plus extend and curl textures smoothly.

 

RGB Difference Keyer

Whether you need to insert filmed objects, effects and live action characters into your animation, the RGB Difference Keyer is your one-stop tool. With an improved Chroma Key effect, simply select a colour in a picture or video and it becomes transparent. Plus, this new tool includes features for removing tints, halos and fringes from the keyed colours.

Motion Blur Node

Tired of manually applying directional blurs? Harmony 17’s new Motion Blur Node automatically creates motion blur on movements between frames, and can be applied to camera motion or directly to assets and pegs.

Master Controller Unroll and Stack Wizards

Take control of your animation with our Master Controller updates, including nudging to allow you to make fine adjustments to the Master Controllers using just your keyboard. Plus, we’ve added an option to enable or disable interpolation between poses, meaning sliders can now be used to select poses with more precision.

We have also brought two new features to our Master Controllers: the Unroll Wizard, which pastes poses from MC rigs to the timeline and makes updating, adjusting and reassembling rigs easier than ever; and the Stack Wizard, combining multiple functions into one set of controllers and allowing for quick creation of 360-degree rigs that can also swap expressions.

Camera Alignment Guides

Need a visual reference while laying out a scene? The new Camera Alignment Guides add horizontal and vertical guides to Harmony’s camera view. Plus, the transform tool’s bounding boxes snap to the new guides.

Preferences, Shortcuts and Frame Markers

Streamline animation by applying different sets of preferences for separate tasks, importing and exporting preferences and shortcuts between multiple machines, and manually marking frames in cutout animation as Key Drawings.

Enjoy the course!