Harmony Server Access - Educational

Drawing Engine & Tools

Harmony is the worldwide standard for 2D animation productions; Harmony's Drawing Engine helps our software stand out from the rest. For any animated project style, from clean and precise solid vector lines to organic textured bitmap lines, Harmony offers any creator an unparalleled assortment of advanced drawing tools. Seamlessly switch between brush to pencil, textured to solid, or even from bitmap to vector with our powerful vectorization technology.

Harmony Brushes feel natural as you can access the most advanced features with our Dynamic Brushes, allowing you to customize your tips from a variety of parameters such as pressure, tilt, or speed. With Pencil lines, you have the ultimate freedom to change line thickness, taper, or texture after they have been drawn. Configure your desired transparency, import or create your line textures, and draw those textures in real-time for both Brush and Pencil lines.

For the best possible results, no matter your level of expertise, Harmony lets you smooth or dynamically stabilize your lines as well as guide your drawings with rulers and perspective guides. Take advantage of Harmony's art layers (up to 4 in each drawing) to separate your lines from your colors or create sub-layers for a multitude of functions. No other animation software will give you this many options while working natively in vector and/or in bitmap!

Color Management

When it comes time to ink or paint a multitude of assets for any project size, what you need is a system that will let you manage your color swatches and palettes effectively from a central place. Harmony allows you to create palettes populated with an unlimited number of swatches which can be vector or bitmap colors depending on your preference.

Each swatch is attributed a unique ID making it extremely easy to update or dynamically change for your animation and compositing needs. Want to change a character's colors based on different lighting situations? The colors on your already traditionally animated asset are not quite right? Harmony's color management system will let you change those non-destructively in no time and share those changes across your entire production line.

Embracing All Styles of 2D Animation

At its core, Harmony has had a long history with traditional animation. Projects based on paper animation can take advantage of Harmony's scanning and auto-vectorization technology, making it a perfect path into digital ink and paint. Want to ditch paper altogether? No problem! Our Xsheet and timeline-based systems, advanced onion skinning, Shift and Trace tool to manipulate drawings as you would on a traditional animation disk, powerful Art Layers, and our dynamic playback or flipping tools will make your Paperless Animation experience a dream come true.

For projects that require rigged characters and props, Harmony has an unparalleled rigging system capable of marrying frame-by-frame with puppet-style animation. Create simple rigs directly from the Timeline or use the Node View, our non-linear nodal system, to create the most complex hierarchies your scenes require.

To top it all off, rig part or all of your character using Harmony's state-of-the-art Master Controller system, a series of tools that allow you to generate manipulators which can affect one or several elements in your rig. Give your animators control of a single deformer or full multi-element character rotations without having to dig inside the rig! With Harmony, any 2D animation style can be achieved at industrial speeds, with emphasis on your artistic needs, without compromising on quality.

3D Integration

While Harmony is used to produce 2D animated content, it has a full 3D environment allowing you to manipulate your assets on all axes simultaneously. Its native camera can be placed and animated in 3D giving us a sense of depth, effortless parallax effects that are accurate, and the ability to navigate around imported 3D objects.

Bring in FBX, OBJ, or Alembic files from any 3D software and animate them alongside your 2D elements. Preview your render directly in Harmony's Camera View (this feature requires Autodesk Maya). Once done, export your asset or camera animations to your desired packages and enjoy the magic of integration!

Compositing and Special Effects

Polishing up your animation project can often be a challenge, especially when you need to wait for animation to be complete before sending it to post-production for effects. With Harmony's non-destructive pipeline, you can add Effects by attaching them directly onto your rigs whether or not you are working with puppets. Thanks to the Node View where everything you create in Harmony is represented by a Node, you can attach, erase, exchange, group, or modify any effect on any Node. Simply select your desired effect from the extensive Node Library and drag it over. Create groups of nodes as templates, save them to share with your team, and reuse them whenever you need them.

In each Node, you can access a myriad of parameters making the possibilities practically limitless. Animate each parameter in time to show dynamic effects such as Light or Surface Shading, Particles, or Color Manipulation. Try our camera lens effects such as the new Bokeh Node which, with Harmony's Floating Point rendering system, will make your production more visually appealing than ever before with greater levels of quality.

Sound Editing

It is often said that sound and music bring animation productions to life. In Harmony, you don't have to work in isolation. Bring in as many tracks as you need from any of the most widely used audio formats. Use audio to sync with your animated content but most importantly use voice tracks to lip-sync your characters. Harmony's automated lip-synching technology will allow you to detect phonemes from any language, map your custom drawings to the track, and voilà! Re-versioning has never been easier and even manual synchronization is a walk in the park at any stage of your character's animation process.