How To Rig in Sweet Harmony

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www.patreon.com/oli How to Rig in Sweet Harmony - Created by Oli Putland Page 1 of 352
d by
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David Stodolny: Joris Bergmans:
Instruction manuals are USUALLY written by tech This must be the sexiest tutorial I've ever seen, and
people who program stuff. knowing this is ToonBoom Harmony we're talking
But as an artist, trying to interpret manuals usually about, that means quite something!
makes my brain go night-night. The very graphical approach makes it not only fun and
But the lord hath smiled down upon me and brought me inviting to read, it also gives you a thorough
Oli Putland's manual. understanding of all the concepts behind rigging in
Written by an ANIMATOR for ANIMATORS and Harmony.
ARTISTS.
It was like watching cartoons and being tricked into Tyler Leonard:
learning something. After reading this book, my personal projects went
from looking like a total noob to looking like
Stein Berntzen: studio quality work
I am 70 years old, and I have used ToonBoom software
for seven years now. I have gone through lots of Adam Oliver:
tutorials, but the way he presents and explains even Oli is a fab fountain of knowledge when it
difficult concepts is just amazing! (And I used to be a comes to Toon Boom and this book is a lovely,
teacher before I retired.) colourful reference for anyone using the
software
Greg Araya:
I teach beginning and intermediate 2D character setup. Martijn Calkhoven:
Oli’s book is now my definitive guide for Harmony. It’s You could spend hours and hours, ransacking the
a great primer on the how’s and why’s of rigging. So internet for rigging tutorials, tips and tricks... Or you
much great info all in one place! could get Oli's book and get on with life. Your book
has helped me lots, I kept it open on a second
monitor during my first TBH project. 10/10
Nick Cofino:
I just discovered his work and subscribed immediately. Peter Davis:
I've been animating with Toon Boom Harmony for 5+ Oli Putland has taken much of the mystery out of
years now and have a good grasp on the software but I ToonBoom Harmony. His tutorials and written
still learned a ton of useful tips in your Harmony Guide materials are great for taking Harmony skills to the next
- fantastic work!! level.
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WELCOME TO HARMONIOUS RIGGING! Noses
Meet the Cats Mouths
But Flash was easier! Avoiding the Crunch
Moving from Animate to Harmony HOW TO MAKE BUS STOP
BASIC SKILLS The Movement Rainbow
How to draw for rigs Slider Wizard
What is the point of a peg? Turning MCs On & Off
CHAPTERS
How Pegs & Drawings behave Node Selection Methods
How to plan a character Grid Wizard
Think about the CPU Mr Balloon Head
Index of the Nodes Master Vs Manual Control
HOW TO MAKE JULIO The No Deformations Head
3D Paths & Separate Functions How to Animate with MCs
Prefer your Preferences The Deformed Head
Body Parts The Rainbow’s Order
Shape Unions with Spice Stack Wizard
Turnaround RIgs Meowth Order
Profile Mouths How to Animate with Stack Wizard
Click a chapter
The Library of Puppets Separate Display for MCs
Bendy Limbs Body MCs
Sublayer Order Vs Z Depth Avoid Ugly Deformations
Drawing Subs & Deformation Subs FRIENDS OF THE CATS
Function Stitching Not The End
Epic Arms
Is it OK to IK?
Hands
Send in the Clones
Heads
Step by Step
Shapes with disappearing lines Bone IK
Create shape unions Constrainer IK
Auto Patch Method Peg Gate IK
Non Cutter Method AutoAuto Patch
Create a PEG/DRAWING setup Synced Layers
Repair Damaged Exposures Non Ripped Deformations
Organise Drawing Substitutions Robust Deformations
Colour Palette Organisation Marker Points
Changing Pivot Points Create Poses for Slider Wizard
Create Pegs for All Layers Create an MC with Slider Wizard
Bone Limb How to Use Scripts
Click a chapter
Curve Limb Create 90º Head for Grid Wizard
Envelope Limb Create an MC with Grid Wizard
FreeForm Limb LipSync with a Stack Wizard MC
Stitching Functions Create a Separate MC Window
Curve IK
Blue prints
Full Body Rig (Raw) FreeForm Limb
Full Body Rig (Composited) Epic Arms
Full Body Rig Curve IK
(Backdropped) Bone IK
Full Body Rig (Grouped) Constrainer IK
Shape Unioned Arm Basic Peg Gate IK
Shape Unioned Arm Fancy AutoAutoPatch #1
Bone Limb AutoAutoPatch #2
Curve Limb Auto Mouth
Click a chapter
Envelope Limb Robust Deformer
Make group node inventions
Warnings
Peg & Drawing Workflow
Messy drawings can be painful to rig
When Creating Drawing Substitutions
Duplicate Nodes. Don’t Copy!
Manipulating Exposures
Sensitive Templates
Pivots for Eyes
TIPS
Sub Layer Order Tangles
Fine Tuning Stored Stuff
Not all Cutters are created Equal
When Storing Whole Characters
Beware of Drifting Pivots
Auto-AutoPatched Hands
Avoiding the Dreaded PING!
The Template Timeline
Deformation Drift Dangers
Select things with Tags
Keep track of Deformation Points
Click a chapter The Grid Template
Keep MC Body Parts Independent
The Flipper Peg
To Avoid the Body’s Dreaded PING!
Master Controller General Tips
Flipper & Anti Flipper
Welcome to
Harmonious Rigging!
When I started writing this guide, I thought it was going to be just a few pages
long. Turns out I had learned rather a lot more in the 8 years I’ve been working
with this software than I had first thought!
This app is huge. It can be used in a myriad of different ways- from traditional
frame by frame animators of the old school, via digital puppet techniques and
through to the brand new emergence of highly advanced semi-automated
processes of the avant-garde.
As such, I found that whatever door I opened when writing, several new ones
automatically found themselves opening as well!
This guide is not and probably never will be- finished.
It will adapt and evolve as long as people develop new styles and demands
from an increasingly demanding workplace.
This guide is a tapestry of discoveries, inventions and inspirations

drawn from many many quarters.
Please enjoy discovering them with us!

Meet the cats
Aniseed Bon BON JOLLOP BuS-STOP
TIPS Step by Steps Warnings Reassurances
Hi! Hello. Ha ha! Hey there! Heeeey! Don’t sweat it, dude.
I give tips, encouragement When you need step by step Not to worry you, but… well I I’m here for you. Just to calm
and advice! advice, I will lay out a plan of pop up when there is you down when things get
action for you to refer to something to worry about! heavy. You can do this. Relax
again and again.
But Flash was easier!
Before I start, I must address the elephant in the room: Adobe Animate.
When I initially jumped in from Flash to this, Flash was indeed the
easier of the two apps to pick up.
Its stark simplicity allowed me to pick up a Wacom pen and just get
on with animating.
Pegs?! Composites?! All these fancy buttons and dials?!
Why oh why can’t Harmony just let me get on with it?!
Harmony may be more complex on the face of it, but learning

the basics pays dividends, and in the end, one can use it just
as quickly as if not quicker than Flash. You just have to
know where things are and how they work.
Which is of course, what I’m here for ;-)
Initially, you will have to un-learn habits which you

may have been practicing for years AND THIS IS THE
HARDEST BIT, I REMEMBER.
My advice at the beginning is keep your early

projects fun and simple, and don’t get bogged
down with too much complexity.
Moving from Animate to Harmony
1. DON’T USE SYMBOLS
Harmony actually includes something known as a Symbol, but it’s inclusion is misleading, and
personally I feel it confuses the new user into thinking they understand something of how Harmony
works, when in fact, Symbols in Harmony not only don’t behave the same way as they do in Animate,
but actually limit the benefits of Harmony so much that there is very little point in going over to
Harmony at all if you start using them.
Symbols are a neat idea, but I believe Animate’s use of them has become stunted, and Harmony’s Peg
and Drawing substitution methods are ultimately capable of quicker and more intuitive workflows.
In other words: Don’t ever use Symbols. Erase them from your mind- it’ll do you a power of good.
2. YOU CAN EASILY MOVE THINGS IN Z.
The biggest drawback I found with Flash was that you weren’t able to move
things in front or behind each other during the animation.
As such, you would have to create a duplicate set of body parts which would
‘show’ or ‘hide’ themselves during the timeline to give the effect of moving
forwards and backwards in space.
This is tiresome and really should have been worked out by now, but it
hasn’t.
Harmony can do this, and it saves a huge amount of time and allows for
more robust working methods. The ‘Alt+ Up or Down Arrow’ combination is
one of the most useful commands Harmony has over Flash. Use it.
3. DRAWING IS DIFFERENT
One oft touted feature that Macromedia created in Flash was its
amazing Vector based drawing tools.
A big feature Animate won people over with was the general method
of image creation, with some of Macromedia’s inventions such as the
Vector Flood fill actually making their way over to ‘illustrator’. It felt
like a bitmap drawing app with all the perks of a Vector based system-
low file sizes and ever-sharp images.
Drawing in Harmony has more flexibility than Animate, and

because of this, there are several new skills which both mimic
and contradict drawing methods that you may have previously
learned elsewhere.
Once you master the basics, clean line work is actually much more
predictable in Harmony than any other vector based image
creation program I’ve ever used. Flash may still have
the total edge for simplicity, but Harmony definitely
has the edge in multiplicity.
I would suggest mucking about with small shapes and

creations and fiddle with brush settings until you get a
working method that you like. Custom Hotkeys and menu
buttons would probably help your working methods
considerably here too, so I’d look into customising things to taste
pretty early and seeing what there is to plunder.
4. DEFORMATIONS
Animate technically has the ability to manipulate bones, but since the last time I used them, they are crude and I never found them to be even
slightly useful in any work I produced, so just avoided them. Harmony has a very elaborate system of deforming drawings to make them appear
just as useful as if you were sculpting with your own artwork. You’ll be using a lot of these.
5. PEGS
I mentioned Symbols before. The biggest downside of Symbols is the inability to see a live preview of all other symbols moving while you are
working ‘inside’ one. If one symbol has to match up with another, a lot of guesswork has to be employed, figuring out at what frame a symbol
matches and how. With the What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get system in Harmony, you will always know how things are to look when you hit
Render.
6. HAVE FAITH
When you learn Harmony for the first time, there will be a few times when your
patience might run a little thin.
Why haven’t they automated this process?
Why don’t they have a standard rigging system for bipeds?
Why is it so darn complicated to just do a simple little thing?!
As I have discovered the more I rig using this software, the more I realise how
unique every project is, and that to have a standard rigging method would
actually be very unhelpful to make decent puppets as they wouldn’t
accommodate each character’s needs.
Once you get the basics down- and trust me, they aren’t that complicated- just different
to Animate- you’ll do it automatically without thinking about it.
Have Faith. It’ll be alright in the end.
IC
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How to draw for rigs
Drawing a character for puppet creation can be fun, but it does require precision and care at all stages of creation so that it behaves properly.
THEN you can have more fun animating with it.
How to draw body parts

The simpler the rig, the less fussy you have to be. If you have a rig that looks like the character was cut from paper and joined together with
pushpins, then you really can relax and let it all hang out. It’s once your rig becomes more detailed that you have to be more precise with your
craftsmanship. Economy and cleanness of line & form is crucial for preventing the various body parts from misbehaving when they are being
pulled around by the deformers later on.
There are a few tricks and procedures to follow and abiding by them will save time as well as making the character look and function better.
Brush NO. Pencil YES
There are two methods of drawing in Harmony. Using
the Brush Tool and using the Pencil Tool.
If you’re coming directly from Flash, it may be tempting

to instantly opt for the Brush tool for drawing with, as in
Flash, this allows for lines with personality, and is much
more interesting to look at.
Harmony’s brush tool is fairly similar to Flash’s so no-

one is going to be surprised at how the brush tool
behaves at all.
Harmony’s pencil tool feels quite different and I would

urge you to start using it- at the very least for Rigging
work.
I find I default to using the Brush tool for rough

animation and for making quick marks which can be
cleaned up later, and the pencil tool for pretty much
everything else.
The pencil tool in Harmony allows for a line which

responds to various line thickness. These can be created
either using a stylus with pressure, or manipulated later
using the pencil editor tool- which is what I tend to do.
When rigging, you often want to create very precisely
rigged parts, and so manipulating them accurately is
paramount. Using the pencil tool allows you to do this
with far more ease and efficiency than the Brush tool
Brush Tooled line Pencil Tooled line
ever can.
Another neat trick you can perform with the pencil tool is when in-betweening.
Imagine this:
I draw a circle.
Now I duplicate the drawing and I have the same exact circle on the next frame,
right?
I can now manipulate the duplicated shape really easily by teasing the points around,
making subtle drawing substitution movements extremely simple.
This also has the benefit of keeping the line thicknesses EXACTLY THE SAME, so no
excessive boiling occurs.
Red is previous
Black is current frame
Green is next
If you do wish to add a little boil, this is easily created with just a few tweaks,
rather than redrawing ALL of the stuff all over again.
Warning!
Messy drawings can be painful to rig

You can (though I don’t recommend it) draw the entire character in one layer, and
then systematically break it down into its component parts.
The problem with this, however fun it may initially be, is that breaking it down
afterwards is a ruddy nightmare, with bits and pieces of line and fill art scattered
around a messy mix of muddled points to deal with at a later stage which have a
tendency to make envelope deformers rip them apart.
I would recommend that you draw each of the character’s body parts in their
entirety on a layer by layer basis and construct as you go. You may find planning
the shapes by drawing them on paper a helpful way to start before you draw
anything properly.
‘Lozenges’
When interpreting the original art work, it’s best to think of every part as a
complete shape of its own. Even if there are gaps in the artwork, you have to 4
imagine ‘invisible’ lines joining them together to make a solid shape.
3 5
This picture of a character’s hair in transparency mode demonstrates the 6
‘lozenge’ system. They are just a collection of 8 ‘lozenges’ which can be
morphed and pulled around to create other shapes later in the interpolations.
For normal rigs, you won’t have to worry about this in quite so much detail, but
for Master Controlled Heads, you have to think very carefully about what shape 1 8
will morph into what at any point. 2 7
You have to think laterally here- lozenge 1 will have to become the whole lower
hair of the head when turned 180 away from us and lozenge 8 will have to
disappear altogether by hiding behind the head.
Ready made lozenges

I would also recommend you draw everything using
rectangles and circles first. That way you have perfectly
constructed and joined together ‘lozenges’ which can be
pushed and bent around by both you and later the master
controller’s deformers to your hearts content!
Avoiding ‘Tearing’
This is when the drawing leaves unwanted artefacts when being pulled into
shape by deformers.
Unlike Bitmap imagery where you make things large and then reduce them
down for versatility, Deformer nodes used in rigging prefer their drawings
small so you can enlarge them! There are no hard and fast rules here, but I’ve
covered how to combat this problem later in the guide.
Open GL View
The Deformation Glitch
When you preview artwork on the OPEN GL view, the artwork will be an
approximation of the end result. If you hit the RENDER button, it will show you a
much clearer example of the finished art. When using deformers for the setup
phase it is vital that you often preview your work at almost all times using the
both modes as it shows you how things will REALLY look in the finish. You want
both to be as good as possible, really.
The odd glitch in the OPENGL preview is acceptable, though its best to avoid it
Render view
whenever it occurs as it can be confusing if you can’t quite predict what you’ll
eventually get while animating.
Too many points spoil the rig
When drawing a rigged shape, it is important to think of that shape as a kind of rig of its own. If you keep shapes elegant and simple,
rather than slashing at them, randomly, you open up the possibility of being able to easily bend the artwork at any stage. Think of the lines
as bones with the points as hinges. The more hinges you have, the more work you have to put in to moving something around, which is
usually to be avoided.
No Yes!
Too many points. No logic in their placement. Invisible stroke A circle is initially created, then points are manually added by
slices object at odd places. Broken handle angles clicking the line while pressing CTRL.
Points can be deleted by selecting them with the contour editor &
pressing DELETE. The shape is ‘sculpted’ by pulling the
levers around, taking care not to ever ‘break’ the angle
of the levers. Keep point’s levers unbroken.
Creating line bends

For later deformation, it’s a good idea to avoid creating sharp bends in the
artwork. Instead, mimic the effect by placing 2 or 3 points close to each other and
have the point’s levers be joined and not broken.
How to create shapes with lines that
1 3 fade to nothing
1. Select the pencil tool, or shape tool.
2. Draw the shape, making sure it forms a complete loop or

‘lozenge‘.
2 4 3. Select the pencil editor tool.
4. While holding down cmd, click anywhere on the shape you want
5 6 the line to start fading.
5. Then click the place you want the line to disappear.
6. Holding the Shift key, grab the red dots and pull them together
until the line thickness ‘disappears’
7. To be really thorough, grab the handles and while holding Shift,

crisscross them so they ‘pinch’ the line to create a ‘negative’.
7 7
By making a shape this way, with a line
which fades in and out, you can
manipulate the form a lot more
comfortably in the future than if the
line has breaks with stray parts and
points flying around. Ugh!
Creating shapes... from shapes.
This is an important skill for any rigger to have:
The ability to seamlessly create one perceived shape from several different drawings.
Look at this simple character:
He is clearly comprised of 3 different generic shapes- A triangle, a square and a circle.
Yet somehow, they are joined together, with an outline that slides all the way round him.
How to do this?
The general principle is this:
You divide each shape into at least two components- The Line Art, and the The Colour Art.
Every drawing layer can have up to 4 Sublayers to play with- Overlay, Line, Colour &
Underlay.
These are just names, and can actually have whatever you want within them.
If you want the Line art contained on the Colour Art layer and the colour actually on the
Overlay layer, you do that m’darling. There really isn’t any reason that this shouldn’t happen.
EXCEPT. If you do separate things in the conventional way, you are able to use the ‘AUTO-
PATCH’ node. More on that later...
Now what we need to do is cut the line art at appropriate areas so that the appearance is
given of union between the parts.
Bon Bon will show you several different methods of doing the same thing:
How to create shape unions
I’m going to show you 2 methods

of creating shape unions.
I’ve shown you two methods because

too many auto-patches or cutters
can weigh heavy on a cpu, so pick
your fighters!
The auto patch method is shown in blue
The non auto patch method is shown in

yellow
How to separate Line & Colour Art for shape unions
For use with an auto-patch 1

1. Select the Drawing Window
2. Assuming you’ve created the artwork in the

line art layer, make sure you are currently
looking at the line art sub-layer
2 3
3. Select all the fills from the artwork then ‘Cut'
them
4. Select the colour art sub-layer and ‘Paste' the

fills into it
5. Reselect the line art sub-layer (You don’t have

to do this part, but it’s good practice)
6. Repeat this for each Shape you wish to

4 5
unionise.
Notice the sub-layer buttons.
In step 5 the ‘eye’ icon is shown as ‘on’.
That means all the sub-layers are shown

in the ‘drawing’ window
How to create auto patch shape unions
1
1. Make sure you have separated the art’s
Line and Colour Art for both Triangle &
square as shown in the previous page
2. Grab an auto-patch from the node library

and drag into the node view.
3. Couple things together as shown, and the

auto-patch with figure out how to sandwich
things together correctly.
2 3
How to separate Line & Colour Art for shape unions
For use without an AUTO-PATCH
1 1. Select the Drawing Window
2. Assuming you’ve created the artwork in the line art
2 3 layer, select the line art sub-layer
3. If there are any fills, delete them.
4. ‘Copy’ line art
5. Select the colour art sub-layer and ‘Paste’ the line art
into it
6. Convert the line art into strokes by clicking the ‘Pencil

to Brush’ Button in Tool Properties.
4 5
7. Fill the shape.
8. Delete the converted line art in the Colour Art layer so

that only the fill remains there.
9. Reselect the line art sub-layer (You don’t have to do

this part, but it’s good practice)
10. Repeat this for every shape you wish to unionise
6 8 9
7
How to create shape unions without AUTO-PATCH
1
1. Make sure you have separated the art’s Line
and Colour Art for Triangle & Square as
shown on the previous page.
2. Grab 2 line art nodes and 2 colour art nodes

from the node library and drag them into the
node view.
3. Couple things together so that you manually

sandwich the sub-layers together in the right
order as shown
2 3
No matter what patching system you use
If you move individual shapes around in Z axis using [Alt

Up[ or [Alt Down[, the appearance of a patch will
disappear as the shuffling of sublayers will change.
Make node group
‘Inventions’!
TIP!
So you’ve created something rather complex in the node view.
If you want to use it over again and again in several projects, its worth thinking about
making a ‘group’ which you can just drag and drop from the Library for regular use-
It saves barrels of time!
First right click the Library and make it ‘Right to Modify’
Then just group everything you want and copy & paste it into the library.
Colour palettes
Palettes play more of a role than just colouring things in. They can
be used to cut with and useful for selection methods so it’s vital that
they be setup correctly.
These rules.
Every character’s rig should have its own palette. Never mix them
up.
The exception to this might be a rigging palette or some kind of

masking palette whose colours must have universal colour ID’s
Avoid using one colour swatch for multiple elements even if they
use exactly the same colour. Instead, just copy the swatch (without
the ID) and name them both their respective labels eg- hair and
suit. Or eyes and teeth. Aniseed’s palette Bus Stop’s palette
Use a separate colour (I recommend a garish one) for rigging and TEETH Headphones Skin A
cutters. These are tools and they need to be bold and clear in case
Shade Cheeks Skin B
they are accidentally rendered somehow.
Another advantage of creating colours in this way is that changing Skin Eyes Line
an element at a later stage is extremely easy without the need for
repainting artwork. You just change the colour in the palette and it Line Nose Shade
updates across the whole animation!

Collar Tail Glasses
Nose
Node & Layer naming conventions
Character Name Prefix
Bad name Unlike Flash, it is best to NOT name everything with a common prefix such as
MR_Happypants_.
When rigs are grouped at the finish, there are no naming conflicts between
characters. In other words: MR_Happypant’s ’NOSE’ does not conflict with
Good name
MRS_Sadpant’s ‘NOSE’!
By adding large amounts of unnecessary text, you make both the timeline and
the node view extremely cluttered and hard to work with.
Doing things this way not only make things quicker, but has the added benefit
of allowing you to use elements of a build between character rigs without
naming confusions later on.
-Detail
This is worth putting as a Suffix for solitary line detail used in wrinkles or folds
of the overall design as they are not initially obvious what they are unless
No conflicts. Same name: “Nose” labelled as such.
Eg: A_Hair-DETAIL_03 or B_Arm-DETAIL_01
Not left & right. Use A & B
Several times during a shot, sometimes the rig is flipped. Therefore, it is best
practice for you to label your rig with the prefix A or B like: A_Arm or B_Arm
rather than left or right which is open to mis-communication, particularly when
you inevitably ‘flip’ the Character.
Suffix
-P for pegs. (This is automatically done for you by the software)
-VPEG for drawings acting as pegs (VisualPegs)
-CUTTER for cutters. Eg: Head_cuts_Mouth-CUTTER
-COMP for composites. Eg: Mouth-COMP
-DETAIL for small, one line drawing additions as discussed
Display names
I use display nodes quite a lot, not just for individual characters, but for parts of
the characters. There is a pull down menu where you access all the displays in
a scene, and since it’s quite small, it's vital you name things consistently and
concisely. Here’s an example:
BusStop, BusStop MC, Aniseed, Aniseed MC, Aniseed Eyes. Etc.
That way you can tell the character and what part of the character easily.
What is the point of a peg?
When you create a drawing layer on the timeline, you’ll soon feel very comfortable with the idea of
creating fresh drawings, manipulating them and then even repositioning the drawing layer by moving
it around with the Translation tool.
If you follow tutorials, eventually they will tell you to create a Peg layer, join it to the Drawing layer and
use THAT for moving it all around instead.
After a while, this extra clutter flowing around the node view and timeline will eventually make you
wonder just what the Peg is actually doing.
Well what IS the point of them?
They seem to be very limited don’t they? They can’t hold any drawings of their own on the timeline.
Their pivot points can’t be changed, and they just seem rather pointless. After all, I can do all the
rigging with drawings alone can’t I?
Well, yes you can.
Yes, technically you can do pretty much most things just using drawings. You could create an entire animation without using pegs at all. Certainly
traditional animation techniques wouldn’t require them. You would just animate the piece conventionally. And if you need to reposition anything, you
could just move the layer directly using the Transform Tool couldn’t you?
Yes…
So why the heck do I need pegs then?
Two main reasons.
1. It’s easier to organise on the timeline Messy Timeline with Drawing Subs and Keyframes jumbled together
If I only used the drawing’s timeline for both drawing

substitution and drawing translation, it would
become very fiddly to rearrange the keys and
drawings if they overlap.
Neat Timeline with Drawing Subs and Keyframes occupying separate bars
By effectively having two timelines- one for key-
framing and one for Drawing Subs, I’m able to
rearrange the timing of my animation more
comfortably than if I have to use the ‘keyframe only’
or ‘drawing only’ buttons to do it.
2. They are actually required when using Deformations
You must have a peg in place for deformations to work properly, otherwise, when you
try to move the drawing, the drawing will ‘slide around the deformation you have
created, rather than move both the drawing and the deformation together. Try making a
deformation without using any pegs and you’ll see what I mean. With more advanced
rigs, this ‘feature’ can actually be quite useful in itself, but for the most part it is to be
avoided.
Using Pegs also allow you to be more nuanced with your rigging structures, but we’ll
come onto that later.
How Pegs and Drawings Behave
Oli as ‘Peg’
Aniseed as ‘Drawing’
Hi there!
I thought I’d make an appearance in the guide myself to help demonstrate the relationship between ‘The Peg’ who will be portrayed by me and
‘The Drawing’ who will be portrayed by Aniseed, since he was the only one of the cats who would happily get into a collar and leach without
suddenly falling asleep or start biting me.
How they move
Example 1: Peg Leads Drawing Example 2: Peg Leads Drawing while Drawing fidgets
I select the Peg in the node view or the timeline layers. I select the Drawing in the node view or the timeline
layers then move it around.
When I move the Peg around in the camera view, the Drawing
attached to it follows obediently, like a good dog- I mean cat! It will move around on its own while STILL being led by
the Peg as well. This is NOT usually what you want.
How they pivot
The Peg’s Pivot is limited to one place.
If it’s ever moved it stays the same across the entire

timeline.
Drawing number 6
Pivot is now on the tail
The Drawing’s Pivot however is not limited to one place
For each separate piece of artwork in a Drawing layer, the pivot can
be totally different
Drawing number 4
Pivot is now on his waist
How to ‘train’ your Drawing using the 2 golden rules
Now do you remember the example I set earlier?
That the Drawing and the Peg kind of fight against each other. One can move and the other can also move as
well?
Well most of the time… we don’t want that.
What we DO want is the tidiness of the Peg’s timeline and the flexibility of the Drawing’s pivot system.
We also want to be able to click the Drawing in the Camera view, and move the Peg with it, automatically.
THE 2 GOLDEN RULES
Here is the Layer Properties window for any Drawing Layer.
The 2 golden rules for the Drawing/Peg dynamic are…
1 The Drawing Is NOT animatable
Movement information- Position, Scale, Rotation etc is not

able to be stored on the Drawing’s Timeline.
Now when you click a Drawing, keyframes are made in

the Peg’s timeline instead
The Drawing’s pivot EMBEDS itself onto the Parent Peg

2
Whatever the Drawing’s pivot may be, it’s now the Peg’s
Here’s another way
of explaining it
Before
Basically… we have to make the Peg more…

submissive to the Drawing
After
And impose the Drawing’s will into

the Peg!
AT LAST! Now the Drawing and Peg are interlinked as one entity!
You now can click on the Drawing and you always MOVE THE PEG! Spooky.
The flow of logic
Here is the ‘Layer Properties' of the Drawing and how it influences the
end outcome of the joined peg’s pivot
When “Apply Embedded Pivot on Drawing Layer” is selected
The Drawing’s pivot is ignored when you click in the camera view.
Peg changes
where Drawing
appears
When “Apply Embedded Pivot on Parent Peg” is selected
The Peg’s pivot ‘adds’ its values to the Drawing’s pivot.
In other words, the Peg’s pivot IS INFLUENCED BY DRAWING NODE

UNDERNEATH IT.
First, the Drawing Then Peg
tells peg where to changes where
start Pivot from. Drawing appears
1
How to create a basic Pegged

Drawing layer setup
1. Go to Preferences/Advanced Tab- Uncheck Element Node
“Animate Using Animation Tools” Default Value. This forbids
any new keyframes being created on any drawing layer by
default.
2. Create a Drawing Layer.
3. Once you have drawn something, use the pivot tool to define 2
where you want the pivot for that drawing to be.
3 4
4. With the drawing layer selected, press ‘Add Peg’ which will
automatically add pegs to each of the layers selected. Another
way is to add a peg node from the Node Library and manually
‘couple’ it to the Drawing layer as shown.
5. With the drawing still selected, hit this button- ‘Set Properties
on Many Layers’
6. Select ‘Use Embedded Pivot’ - ‘On Parent Peg’ - This will

make sure when you select the drawing layer in the future, you
5
will actually be using the peg’s timeline to create keyframes, not
the drawing’s. 6
Peg and Drawing
Workflow
TIP!
Here’s the way I actually get things done when I create the artwork for a full
character rig…
…I create ALL the

drawing layers and sort
their pivots first…
…select them all, then

click ‘Set Properties on
Many Layers’…
…then click ‘Add Peg’.
This save a huge amount

of time and gets it all
done at once!
The 3 pivots
I won’t lie, dealing with multiple ways to manipulate pivots can be quite a handful- certainly when you are first learning the software, but as you
progress, you are able to predict how they behave more reliably and can even twist their quirks to your advantage.
Each Pivot has their own manipulator tool and their own limitations and superpower.
Pivot Tool
Super Power Limitation Manipulate with
type icon
The Pivot is Temporary and can be The Pivot will reset to the
Live moved around to any place at any original position if Translate Tool
time. unselected
Only one pivot can ever Advanced Animation
Peg Simplicity
be set Rotate Tool
Needs some kind of
A new pivot can be set with each new
Drawing image present to Pivot Tool
drawing on the layer’s timeline
function properly
Tool
icon
The Pivot is Temporary and
The Pivot will reset to the
can be moved around to any Translate Tool
original position if unselected
place at any time.
Pivot type: Live

This is the first kind of pivot you’ll encounter.
In fact you may have come into contact with something like this in any
piece of image manipulation software out there. Certainly this is the type
of Pivot you get in Flash/Animate.
This is the temporary kind of pivot. The type that allows you to manipulate
what ever you happen to be moving at the time, wether it’s a bit of
drawing, or the temporary shifting of a pivot for one frame- these are the
kind of pivot that allow things to be done TEMPORARILY.
They are not the foundation to build a rig upon. They are for animation
Live pivot moved away. The original and drawing use ONLY.
(Ghost) pivot is still shown in the
centre.
Pivot Tool
type icon
Only one pivot can ever Advanced Animation

Peg Simplicity
be set per peg Rotate Tool
Pivot type: Peg

This is the most useful pivot when rigging, but perhaps the least
glamorous.
To move the Peg’s own pivot around, use the slightly quirky option of the
Advanced Animation Rotate Tool in the Advanced Animation toolbar-
trust me, you get used to it
Usually you won’t need to bother doing this at all if you’ve applied the 2
golden rules, but when a deformation is added to the drawing, it will
cause the pivot to fly off course, so you will need to readjust the pivot
manually again using this method.
Moving the Peg’s pivot around using the

‘Advanced Rotate Tool’. Bizarre but true.
Tool
icon
A new pivot can be set with
Needs some kind of image
each new drawing on the Pivot Tool
present to function properly
layer’s timeline
Pivot type: Drawing

This is the most basic built in kind of pivot.
This one has the benefit of being set permanently, unlike the LIVE pivot
which is set on a use by use basis.
The really big benefit of the Drawing Layer’s Pivot is the ability to
change the Pivot PER Drawing substitution.
This can be of real benefit when you rig different Angles of body parts
such as mouths or even the entire torso.
Each Drawing Substitution on a single Drawing Layer/Node has a

completely new pivot of its own.
Creating new drawing substitutions
When creating new drawings, it’s important to know the two different methods of creation for two different reasons.
Create New Drawing

1- Create New Drawing.
This creates a new drawing with a
completely reset pivot point.
Pivot Tool
Duplicate Drawing
2- Duplicate Drawing.
This duplicates the drawing
as well as the pivot point.
It’s sometimes a good idea to duplicate a drawing, even when you don’t actually want the duplicated artwork so that the pivot point is EXACTLY THE
SAME.
In fact, most of the time I just Duplicate Drawings and then just erase the duplicated artwork so that I know the pivot point is the same as the
previous image, and then manipulate the pivot point from that point if I need to. Aniseed explains this a bit clearer a bit later on.
Don’t Sweat!
Practice
Heeeeyy. Don’t worry.
Pegs and Drawings are amazing, but they can be VERY tricky to get
your head round at first.
My advice is to just create a Peg and a Drawing Layer and muck

about with how they behave. Make loads of Drawings substitutes,
move the pivots around. Go nuts.
If they seem to misbehave, try fiddling with the Golden Rule

settings Oli mentioned earlier in the Layer Properties window.
Muck about with the concepts until you understand them more
throughly, Once you get it- it makes total sense, but initially-
especially if you’re coming from another piece of software, this
may be quite tricky to grasp.
This is Harmony’s answer to ‘Symbols’ and although it’s initially

more complicated, it ends up becoming more versatile, easier to
use and more intuitive. Trust me!
Drawing Substitutions and Exposures
Each drawing layer is essentially to be regarded as a piece of film footage which can be spliced, chopped and changed around to taste.
The actual artwork is stored in the project’s ‘Elements' folder.
How they are stored and used is important to understand because it initially can make no sense!
Here’s an example.
I draw 4 faces which occupy 4 frames

of footage on the timeline.
Now I decide to select them all on the

timeline and hit delete.
They’re all gone now right?
Nope.
They’re all still there- they are just NOT

EXPOSED. Trust me. Go to the ‘Drawing
Substitutions’ Window and you’ll see them all
there, staring right back at you, waiting for you
to select them.
On any drawing layer your timeline is filled with various different actual
pieces of artwork. These are referred to as ‘Substitutions’
Whenever you create a new drawing, you are
creating a fresh piece of art which is only truly
deleted if you right click the frame and select
Drawings>Delete Selected Drawings.
Then they really ARE nuked.
Both from the timeline AND from the Elements

folder.
A glimpse into the contents of the ‘Elements’ folder of a Toon Boom

Harmony project
The numbering system too can be a little confusing at first. Frame one
doesn’t necessarily correlate with Drawing one. Like a dope sheet, you
can repeat or reorder the actual artwork in accordance with the frame
numbers, so don’t always expect your drawings to tally.
If you really want to be fancy, you can relabel elements to make them
organised in the way YOU want, and not just the order of their creation.
For example, you can rename Mouth Drawings from 1,2,3,4 etc to
Smile_A, Smile_B, Smile_C, Frown_A, Frown_B, Frown_C etc.
When drawing for rigs, you are mainly going to use Drawing
Substitutions for replaceable elements like Hands, Blinks or Mouths
which are often too much of faff to manipulate any other way.
This isn’t to say ‘THOU SHALT NOT RIG HANDS, BLINKS OR MOUTHS’
it’s just that these elements are notoriously fiddly elements, and it is
MUCH faster to animate these elements by flicking between images-
take it from me!
Another weird thing you may encounter (particularly in complex rigs) is drawing
elements suddenly disappearing for seemingly no reason at all, which may even
effect how the rest of the rig ‘falls into place’. Arms or legs may suddenly find
themselves dancing around the screen for seemingly no reason.
There is a reason of course- it would be because the

exposure of these elements is missing as shown here:
The ‘No Exposure‘ substitution should only really be

used across the entire rig in unison. If you really don’t
want a drawing element shown, best to have a blank
piece of artwork as the substitution instead which still
preserves pivot information and keeps the node system
‘flowing’.
How to repair damaged exposures
1. Collapse the groups until you are dealing with just one or two layers in the timeline which comprise the entire rig.
2. Select all the erratic frames as a long uninterrupted bar.
3. Right click and select: Exposure>Fill Empty Cells
4. If you expand the groups now, all the Drawings will be exposed to the frame you want
5. To neaten things up even more, collapse the group, select everything, right click and
select: Exposure>Remove Duplicate Key Exposure
When Creating Drawing
Substitutions
TIP!
What I personally tend to do when creating any artwork, is to extend the exposure of the art to
the very last frame first.
That way, you know that the art work is consistently at a set length and always visible.
Then when I want a new drawing, I just hit ‘Duplicate Drawing’ where I want a new drawing then
just select and erase the artwork inside.
By doing things this way, it automatically preserves the exact pivot information which,
when creating blinks, or new hand gestures is vital.
Also in the case of Mouths, it has the added benefit of allowing subtle changes of
artwork from one frame to another since they actually are starting from the same
piece of art, so instead of deleting the duplicated image, you just manipulate it a bit!
TIP!
Manipulating Exposures
Select drawing substitutions quickly using the < & > buttons on your keyboard to toggle
between subs. Perfect for making lip sync and blinking a breeze!
Go to an empty frame and hit F5 to ‘Extend the Exposure’ of a drawing or a series of

drawing layers. You can even do this with grouped layers. Which I do all the time.
When you show timeline thumbnails and make the frame size large, you can actually
move frame exposures around by clicking the edges of a frame.
1
How to organise Drawing Substitutions 2
1. Draw a series of mouths, hands or anything else in any order you like
on one drawing layer. 3
2. Shuffle the drawings around in the timeline so the end up in the order
you would like them to be in for later selection. Remember you cannot
accidentally delete a drawing, even if you hit delete, as they are all
stored in the ‘Elements’ folder. Just make sure when you’re done, they
are all ‘exposed’ in the timeline ready for the next step.
3. Go to the X-Sheet. Select all the drawings on the timeline, right click
and select Drawings>Rename by Frame
4. This will now reorder the drawing numbers in the order YOU want.
5. If you want more organisation, You can select groups of frames, then
right click and select Rename with Prefix to add something like
‘’Smile-‘ to your selection. 4
6. By using the Library or the Drawing Substitutions window, you can
select any drawing you want as many times as you want! 5
7. To permanently nuke a drawing, select it in the timeline, right click and
hit Drawings>Delete Selected Drawing.
6 7
The V-PEG
There is one more element to basic rig creation which is very important to know about:
The Visual Peg.
This isn’t something you will be able to find in the Node Library as it technically doesn’t exist.
In fact, it’s just a drawing. Nothing special in itself at all.
It’s the way it’s used that’s special.
As mentioned before Pegs are jolly useful for connecting drawings together and allowing for the
timeline information to be better organised, but they have several limitations- the most annoying
being that you can’ actually get hold of a peg itself without fiddling around in the timeline or node
view.
Firstly, here is a node view setup of a
standard ‘Head’
Although this does everything you want,

sometimes you want to move the entire
‘face’ of the character and not just the
individual elements such as the Eyes,
Nose & Mouth.
One way of doing this is just by Shift
Selecting every element in the Camera
view and then moving things around
with a temporary pivot which over
time, is slow and cumbersome
Here is a peg which should allow me to
manipulate all the facial features of a
character by selecting it.
This works well, however the downside of

this setup is that you have to go into the
timeline or node view to select it as there is
no actual graphical element to ‘select’ in the
camera view.
I don’t know about you, but I’m a visual person.
When I animate, I want to lose myself in the character and not

have to mess about with Node views and Timelines. At least for
the most part.
Now some animators use a series of hot keys to navigate these

‘hidden’ parts of their rigs, but personally I hate doing that, and
there is a much more user friendly way to work this kind of
stuff in.
It’s by using a ‘Visual-Peg’
These visual pegs have absolutely no purpose other

than acting as aids to let the artist ‘grab’ onto several
elements at once and manipulate them as a kind of
group, quickly and easily.
Jollop as Drawing V-PEG
These elements should be bright
using garish colours totally at odds
with the rest of the model so they
don’t get confused with the rendered
artwork.
You can then attach them to the rig in such a way that:
A- they are always ‘on top’ of the artwork of the

puppet
B- they are only visible in the working preview and not

rendered in the finished composite.
I’ve created a whole ‘area’ for Rigging to
go in incase there are other VPEGs to go
into the character.
They can just be joined to the

Rigging_COMP and all the Visual and
On-Top information will happen
automatically.
By building in the occasional VPEG, it allows an extra degree of sophisticated manipulation to your characters and will
save vast amounts of time when working with them.
Personally, I tend to always have 2 or 3
per character. Facial Features- The
Mouth, Nose, Eyes. The Entire Head and
The Character Label itself which moves
the whole character around like an object
in its own right.
Warning!
COPY node
Anything you
do, I do the same! All
DUPLICATE NODES. DON’T COPY! the time! Forever!
This is probably the best advice I can give this early in the guide.
In all other programs, when you ‘copy and paste’ something, it means that once you do
so, the copy is totally independent of the original.
Not so here.
First of all, the ‘copy’ command in Harmony is context sensitive. Meaning that copying I look the
a piece of artwork doesn’t quite behave the same way as copying a node, or layer. same, but I am totally
unique. like a fresh
As far as nodes go, ‘Copy’ in Harmony really should be called ‘Clone’ instead. The copy
drawing node
mimics the original and vice versa AT ALL TIMES. If you delete a frame, the clone will
delete one too. If you flood fill the shape on frame 56, the cloned one will also do the
same. This can be very unhelpful and it can be near impossible to isolate without
extensive troubleshooting. Sometimes clones ARE what you want, but mostly not.
If you do want to clone a node, I would advise you immediately write the suffix _CLONE
in it’s title for future clarity.
DUPLICATE node
If you do want to copy a node in the more normal sense of the word- always use
DUPLICATE instead.
How to plan a character
So you have a character that you’re just DYING to get moving!
Breathe.... If you just take a bit of time to figure out exactly what your project needs from this character, you’ll find this stage will make the
difference between something pretty, yet stiff and awkward to something truly beautiful to watch and use.
1. Plan your animation workflow.
Essentially there are two types of rigging: Heavy or Elegant.
What do I mean by this? Let me explain.
The Heavy type allows total control of everything the character could ever
possibly do.
For example. Imagine rigging EVERY hair on a character’s head. You show
this off at the development stage to your friends and they all marvel at the
complexity that your rig it is capable of. After a few celebratory drinks, the
animator finally sits down to work with the character only to find that after
several hours, due to the complexity of the rig, they have only been able to
move one eyelash a centimetre to the right. The production grinds to a
halt, and everyone suffers a nervous breakdown.
This heavy rig is made from several drawing layers all
individually auto patched and combined with their own
curve deformer
Conversely, the Elegant rig type favours the animation process- This
hairstyle comprises of one giant free-form deformer (new to Harmony
17) with several movable points which allows the animator to very
quickly smush the hair around, getting the animation produced quickly
and efficiently.
This occasionally has its downsides when the animator needs to move
an individual hair around for that bit in scene 23 where a hair is flicked
out of the way by a bug, but because this only happens the once, that
can be tackled then, and the rig doesn’t have to incorporate that level of
complexity at all times.
Choose which elements are important to your character and then figure
out the best way to implement them. It might not be the first idea you
think of, and may evolve over time- particularly after you start
animating with it.
This elegant rig is made from the new Freeform deformer

which is manipulating just one piece of artwork. It’s not as
precise as the heavy rig, but it doesn’t have to be.
2. Anticipate the movement.
Does the character mostly spend their time sitting in the cockpit, only once getting
up to operate the cargo bay doors? Do you ever see their legs, and do they ever
move? Do that have a signature facial tick? Go through the storyboard of a
production and list all the things that a character is ever going to do. If they do
something more than three times, then your rigging will probably have to
accommodate this.
3. Keep it simple.
HEY! I’ve built a character with the ability to automatically bend it’s legs at exactly 90 degrees every
time it is lowered onto the ground!
All you do is program this box here, then you add the variable here, and then you....
Trust in the animators. Their job is to work with what they have.
If something happens very often, then yes, it makes sense to rig something which virtually
animates itself- it will save time, but generally speaking, its best to keep things simple.
The master controller CAN do a lot, but it can also do little things too. Sometimes, it’s the little
things that are far more compatible with the animator’s work flow.
Case in point: I’m working on a method to animate a character’s sleeved arms. Initially, I thought
using the Master Controller for all movement was the way to go. It can make nice ‘tailored’ folds in
the character’s fabric as opposed to the more stiff look they have if they are moved around in the
usual cut-out manner.
I discovered however, that using a much more simplified combination of sliding Master Controllers
for simple shape deformations with a conventional approach to arm rigging yielded better results.
4. Redesign the character.
This can be as subtle or as drastic as you like.
There is a reason why from the 50s onwards,

character design went through a Renaissance-
Television.
The sheer volume of animated content studios had

to produce was so large, and the screens to show
the content so small, that character design had to
change to meet demands. Suddenly, characters
had very clear, graphically stylised boundaries on
their construction. Seam lines on the mouths.
Collars dividing the body- any kind of graphical break, so that one element could hide behind another
and essentially allow for one body part to keep still, while another part could move independently-
saving time and money.
These days, the ultimate in this technique is removing as much line work as you can, allowing for CG
shapes to blend into each other creating blended union shapes and allowing a more easily animated
puppet. In fact, the more abstract the character tends to be the better, as the rules can be bent and
Complex design
changed without breaking the character’s overall design. The more tightly drawn and detailed the
character is, the stiffer the animation has a tendency to be as there are too many elements to move
around.
Even a detailed character can be ‘organised’ so that areas are grouped and packaged into more
manageable shapes. Even certain areas could be master controlled for efficiency.
Try not to interpret a character model as gospel. If you think one tweak could make the difference
between a world of fiddly pain & hours of more efficient work, try tweaking it and see if anyone
notices.
Easy design
Speed up the settings
Turn off Anti-Aliasing when previewing. This extra set of
calculations which slows the CPU down are largely
Think about the unnecessary. I recommend you turn it off in

preferences. If you want to see how things will really
CPU look when rendered, you can always press the render
preview button in the camera window.
It’s no good if you have the best rig in the world if, after
all your rigging, cutting, deforming and everything the Thumbnails enabled in the Timeline, X-Sheet, Top, Side,
blasted design makes the computer explode. Perspective, Drawing Substitution or the Node views.
For a kick off, here are some significant ways you can (Even when they are not visible on screen!) The node
improve performance. view can be a particularly nasty culprit as Thumbnails
can still be active even in groups you’re not currently
looking at. If in doubt, close the node view window and
re-open it again and by default, all the thumbnails will
not be enabled.
OpenGL settings not being correctly configured- I can’t
give you tailored advice here. My advice is to make a
note of how things are in preferences before you start,
and then turn things off and on until you’re happy with
the results.
Import Bitmap images correctly. It may seem obvious,

but I have now worked on several productions that
have accidentally at one stage or another, imported
HUGE resolution sized pictures into their files. Not only
is the high resolution going to impact the CPU speed
considerably if used incorrectly without some kind of Import Video correctly. This is a particularly processor
proxy, it will also increase the overall file size which is hungry area which can be more economically managed if
often undesirable when dealing with the way the you do the following:
Library works in Harmony, and will increase the risk of
slow down. When you are importing an image just to
use as reference, I would suggest you import using A. Create as low a resolution video file as
“Import as Toon Boom Bitmap Drawing” option which possible. 480p or lower is recommended for
will make the image crisp while using in Harmony’s layout work. This will make the file size much
OpenGL mode, as well as allowing bitmap tweaks in smaller too.
Harmony itself. When you want to import backgrounds
or images for actual character work, then “Keep as
B. Import as “Keep original Bitmap” This will
original bitmap” can often work better as the file sizes
create an image stack of .PNG files in your
are smaller, the original images can still be externally
Harmony file which are smaller than Toon
edited, and the resolution is more economically
Boom’s own image format.
managed by the CPU.
Beware of bad networking setups. If you plan to use network every so often, and therefore will
Harmony in a networked studio environment, the behave and just work as it should without the
Network version of Harmony is of course- favourite. foibles of a slow network, jamming up the
However, you can use Harmony in a network using procedures. To remove links in the Library
standard software, but bear in mind the way Harmony view, right click a folder in the Library view
uses the Library view and how that can impact on and select ‘Right to Modify’. Then ’Close
your computer’s performance. Normally, the libraries Library’.
Harmony uses are local to your computer, so
Harmony thinks nothing of quickly referencing back
Use ToonBoom Storyboard Pro for storyboards. I admit,
and forth to these files to get various pieces of
this is not for everyone as every company has their own
information for you while you work, which barely
workflows, but the workflow SB Pro provides will be
impacts on your workflow. However, if you’re using a
more streamlined and ultimately easier to handle, the
networked drive to access your files, if a bottleneck
file sizes significantly smaller due to the lack of bitmaps
occurs, this can severely cripple the performance of
being thrown around and the speed hugely optimised
the computers that are linked up to it.
allowing for faster scene turnarounds.
There are several little ways to improve the situation.
1. Turn to ‘List view’ in the library. This stops

the computer hunting for thumbnail images
which it might not always be able to access
if the network is having a strop.
2. Work from Local files only- including the

Libraries. If you create a temporary folder of
character assets, backgrounds and scenes
on the local computer itself, the Library has
no need to ‘check-the-pulse’ using the
Keep your Nodes lean
It’s especially important that when you’re creating very complex rigs, you build in several devices
that take the pressure away from the graphics card. Cutters, deformers, Image switches, and
standard composites essentially redraw an image from a combination of elements and can grind
the computer to a shuddering halt if used too much.
Remember this list of elements which are known to slow the CPU down when over-used.
Image Switches
Deformers
Cutters
Auto-patches
Standard Composites
Usually when rigs show just how heavy they’ve become, it’s a bit too late to change them easily, so
just lightly tinkering with it won’t make a difference.
You’d need to fundamentally remake the puppet from the ground up.
Therefore…
You must keep your working methods as lean as possible.
Take this as an example of what to avoid:
Now I mentioned this earlier on in the guide, but I feel I have to make it clearer as it’s vital that you learn
this very subtle, yet crucial difference.
Which is leaner?
Blue
Or
Yellow
It’s Yellow.
Yes, I know it has more nodes in it, and if you remember the tutorial from
earlier, you’ll know the Yellow version takes a bit more work.
But it doesn’t use a CUTTER!
It’s that lack of cutter that makes all the difference to your CPU.
The building up of several shape unions is such a staple part of rig

making that cutters can easily build and build and build, eventually ending
in extremely processor heavy rigs which have to figure out which parts of
which element have to be removed to produce the final image.
Camera
The Yellow shape union is essentially a series of flat

Colour Art parts that sandwich each other, with no fiddly
Line Art calculations to make.
The Blue shape union is also a series of flat parts
that sandwich each other.
BUT since you haven’t manually trimmed the ‘fat’ of

the blue fill yourself, the cutter has to do it instead.
Line Art
Colour Art edge
Line Art cuts this part of the Colour Art
The horror!
May I suggest some slimming tips to help
you out?
Firstly, as has been demonstrated (twice now thank you, due to Oli) is to
create shape unions using the Yellow technique whenever possible.
click this Link "how to create a shape-union"
To reduce Cutter use you could also rethink how a character design is
put together entirely- maybe just push an element behind something
else to hide it, or use a drawing substitution for something to make it
‘appear’ cut.
To reduce Deformer points, try using more drawing substitutions-

particularly for large movement changes or simple, repeatable
elements such as blinking or lip sync.
Index of the nodes
Here is an index of all the most used Nodes.
I list them here as they are the fundamental building blocks of most rigs.
PEG
I make sure I anchor a drawing or a set of drawings to ONE default position.
I will show only keyframe information on my timeline. I am a bit boring but indispensable, so there.
DRAWING
I am versatile. Although I can move around the screen on my own, most of the time my positions are dictated by
my peg parents who will put my animation layer timeline where it needs to be.
All that is drawn on my layer is remembered in a ‘hidden timeline’ (A series of images stored in the Project’s
’Elements’ folder) accessible in the library and Drawing Substitutions windows.
I can shuffle my drawings’ order around and they will all be positioned by my peg parents’ keyframe positions.
VPEG
Shhh! Don’t tell anyone, but I am actually a regular drawing layer just used in a different way!
I am to be used more like a peg is used. The advantage I have over regular pegs is that unlike a boring peg, you
can actually click on me in the camera view. Also, unlike a regular peg, I have the ability for multiple pivots which
can be useful for different character angles. As such, I can have dominion over all things, Pegs, Drawings and
Deformations. I am a god!
DEFORMATION (Shown here as a Bones group)
I am second in command to a peg, and as such, my anchor point is dictated by them.
However, once that’s out of the way, I will bend the drawings to where I want them to be! Stretching them so far
sometimes that their original anchor points look totally absurd against my weird affectations!
Don’t get too cocky, as I can ‘tear’ the drawings if used too much,.
Incredible as I am, I cannot deform an already deformed drawing or set of drawings.
CONSTRAINER
I am also second in command to a peg, or rather in my case, two or more pegs.
I don’t really twist the images around like deformations, I just squash and stretch the drawings below me using
the several pegs connected to me as guides.
I can manipulate a deformed drawing or set of drawings. For example, If you want a snake created with
deformations, to be cleverly squashed and stretched around afterwards then I’m your girl.
CUTTER
I use two drawings to cut- one to act as scissors and one to BE CUT BY the scissors.
I can be a bit processor heavy if I’m overused, but can make magical things happen if used well.
MASTER CONTROLLER
I exist on a different plane of existence to the rest of the rabble.
I have the ability to control all things and once programmed, I keep it all in my mind (a JavaScript file stored in
the Project’s ‘scripts’ folder) for safe keeping.
I can be used at anytime and will dictate the terms of the parts I control, absolutely. However, once I’ve had my
moment, I am completely docile and immediately relinquish total control.
I must be created only once the character’s rig structure has been finalised. Change the node structure after I am
created and I will get confused, sulk in a corner and you won’t be able to use me until the original structure is
restored.
COMPOSITE
I am the guy other nodes go to in order to be organised and flattened into place. Once their images have passed
through the various deformations and filters, they are made FLAT by me. I gather things together and
consolidate their positions.
If after me you decide to change the look of what I have provided, that’s up to you to add filters to my output.
COMPOSITE PASS-THROUGH
I am like my brother, only I am more gentle.
Yes, I gather things together and keep things organised, but unlike him, I still allow their Z depth information to
go through unchanged.
This allows various elements to go through me unchanged. I still allow organisation, grouping and clarity, but am
more flexible and much more friendly to your CPU.
LINE ART
I only allow art shown on the Line art sublayer of a Drawing or Composite to pass through me.
COLOUR ART
I only allow art shown on the Colour art sublayer of a Drawing or Composite to pass through me.
PEG TRANSFORMATION
I am a later-stage-peg. I can essentially ‘add’ my position values to a stage in the rig in a way that wasn’t
available at the earlier stages.
I can be used for things like the offset shadow of a character by moving the imagery over a bit in X or Y or
making all the VPEGS float above the actual character by bringing them all forwards in Z.
DISPLAY
I show what passes into to me. Nothing else.
There can be several of us, showing only specific areas of a puppet or scene- Eyes, Mouth, Master Controller,
Just the people on the right, Background only etc...
These are available when ‘Advanced Displays’ is selected in Preferences.
CAMERA
I’m capture what is eventually rendered. I am not really connected to the rest of the rig, Just a single peg
which controls my position, zoom and so on.
There can be several of me with different names which can be selected at any stage of production.
Though you can use several cameras in a single scene, you can only see the contents of ONE camera at a time
across all the displays.
You can set different focal lengths and DOF like a real camera as well as clipping z depths in my settings.
WRITE
I am the organiser of a render.
I am the node that renders what is put into me. I tell the rendered images or movies where to be stored on the
hard disk, what it should be called and in what format- PNG sequence, .MOV file etc.
I’m not essential however. And for small productions, I am rarely needed at all.
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How to Rig in Sweet Harmony - Created by Oli Putland Page 97 of 352

A standard character Rig setup
Ok. Let’s make a biped!
3D paths vs Separate Functions
I mention this this early because it’s a subtle difference and depending on what type of rig you
make, and your preferred working methods, this simple decision can make a big difference.
The general rule is that if you create Master Controllers, it’s best to use the Separate function
keyframing as your default way of peg positioning within your scenes. They are extremely
predictable, precise and the extra complexity they bring allows the sort of micro positioning
you need for that kind of rigging.
However, for most other rigging work, you tend to have much easier time if you use 3D paths
as your preferred peg positioning method. It is more concise and you can ease and tween with
only one keyframe value, instead of three.
Personally, I have Separate turned on by default as it means I can create MC rigs much more
easily, and then if I want to make certain parts of the rig more ‘easy-to-use’ I can do that on a
peg by peg basis.
A Peg’s Layer Properties
3D Path selected Separate selected
3D Path selected
If you look at the timings in the function

view (Don’t worry. You don’t have to use
this, but it gives you a clear idea of how
timing curves are worked out) you can
clearly see that the 3D path’s timings are
much easier to manage.
A peg moves faster or slower in all 3 axis.

Thats it.
Separate selected
However, the timings and even the
actual keys can be different for all
Separate’s functions, allowing for
some extremely subtle timings.
Perfect for Camera moves for

example.
And pretty much essential for some of

the offbeat subtleties of a Master
Controlled Rig.
Function view,
smunction view
Don’t let the grid of the Function view scare you.
To be honest, you rarely need to use it at all. You tend to only have
to use its smaller brother: ‘Set Ease for Multiple Parameters’
which is really simple to use.
Oli was bringing up the Function view to clarify a point.
Hopefully he managed it.
Set Ease For Multiple

Parameters
Its window
Prefer your Preferences
Before we REALLY get down to it, there are some preferences which we need
to address together.
Harmony is a vast app.
And as such, it caters to a large range of animation types from traditionally

drawn animation created in a way pretty similar to the way it would have been
done almost 100 years ago by the great gods.
It also caters for people like me- the Xennials lot who were given computers at
5 years old and see the animation world as a keyframes bar from left to right
as opposed to the traditional dope sheeted world of up and down.
It is vital therefore that you essentially PRIME Harmony for the world that we
riggers are to inhabit. In our case, we want to go as digital as humanly
possible, removing any trace of ‘Field Guides’ and the traditional.
Over the following pages, I’ll show you my preferences and why I’ve selected
key areas.
General #1
Auto Save and Levels of Undo
Put in as many helpers as you can to

guard against ‘Animator’s Anguish’
Display Cardinal Co-ordinates
Do you want values represented as

North, South, East and West, or simply +
and -?
For more complex work, the North,

South, East, West thing is very
cumbersome.
OFF with this.
Support Gestures
After using this software on both Mac and

PC I have this to say.
Mac users get an amazing advantage of

having iPad-like zoom controls when this
is turned on. I have a feeling only Surface
supports it on Windows- not sure.
Flat Tool Toolbar
General #2
Hey! Want to customise your toolbar with
the tools YOU use all the time in the order
YOU prefer? Well of course you do, silly!
Default Separate for…
Since I create quite complex rigs, I want to

make sure the separate settings for these
are my default.
Then for simpler stuff, I can change it on

an element by element basis.
Stop Motion Keyframes
By default, who wants to keep fighting

against the inbetweening from a computer
while you’re still working out the movement
yourself, amirite? Turn this on.
Default Pass Through Composite
You use these MOST OF THE TIME. You

don’t want to have to keep changing the
Comp type in each Comp’s layer
properties. S’boring.
Camera
No Personal Changes
As far as I remember, the defaults do me

fine, but that’s me.
Node View
Middle Mouse Button Pans the

View
I love being able to slide around the node

view easily. This allows me to do that.
Default Thumbnail Resolution
Thumbnails of nodes should largely be

turned off as they crucify the CPU when
playing back your animation, regardless of
their resolution.
However, occasionally they are a really

handy tool to work with, so a decent
resolution is worth having when you want
to take a quick peek.
Exposure Sheet (X-Sheet)
No Personal Changes

Drawing
No Personal Changes

Timeline
Show Effects
Do you really need to keyframe every node

in the Timeline?
For when you are Rigging, yes you do.
When you animate however, you might

want to think turning this off to make the
timeline that little bit less cluttered.
Reduce Indentation
Screen Real-Estate in Harmony is so

important that I want to claw back every
pixel I can get my hands on.
The default is way too relaxed!
Sound
No Personal Changes

Template
No Personal Changes

Settings
OPEN GL
These are purely your own. Make a note of
the default values, then fiddle with them
until you get the performance you prefer.
Full Scene Antialiasing
My advice? Turn it off. It’s a waste of

resources. Even on a super machine. The
only time you might ever need this is when
animating some insanely fancy line-work,
but I would just do a quick render instead,
anyway.
Enable Playback Caching
This is worth faffing about with. Again,

note your default values before you muck
about with this, but increasing the values
can really make a difference in
performance.
Effects
When Rigging- turn on most, if not all of

these settings.
When you’re ready to animate, sometimes

it's worth turning these on or off to taste
as they can eat resources.
Render
Enable Graphics Card Acceleration
Because why not?
Unless you personally have a reason.
Support Overlay & Underlay Art
Ya’ll gonna need them extra sublayers for

Advanced
rigging
Advanced Display
Not strictly necessary. however very useful

for Master Controllers & when you want to
only show certain parts of a rig quickly.
Element Node ‘Animate using

Animation Tools’ Default Value.
Do you want Drawings to have keyframe

values of their own?
Didn’t think so. Let the Pegs handle that.
Turn this off.
(Be careful though, as the first drawing

layer you get when creating a new file
always uses Animation Tools by default,
regardless of this setting!)
Enable Middle Button Pans View
Useful for both Mac and PC users to move

the whole viewing screen around with the
middle mouse button, or an assigned
stylus press.
Deformation
No Personal Changes

Particle
No Personal Changes

Have a road map
Even if you know your character like the back of your hand, it’s important
that you create some kind of plan of action. Not just a rough drawing of a
turnaround or some such, but maybe a range of expressions, poses and a
general sense of the sort of thing that this character is going to need to
do.
As I mentioned in previous chapter- Kudos to you for rigging all 10 of the

character’s toes, but when she just stands behind a surgeon’s table for
the duration of the show, that’s so much effort and work wasted. Time
which could have gone towards the insane rigging needed on her ears
when her patient is having a hallucination in shots 47-52 and sees them
do the Macarena.
Julio’s palette Julio’s palette (CLONED) Colour Palette

TEETH Hair TEETH Hair For each new character I suggest they have a new palette of their own
for various reasons which will become clearer later on.
T shirt Trousers T shirt Trousers
Not only will each colour have it’s own... hue, but also its own
Skin Eyes Skin Eyes identification number which can be used to cut with, change colour, use
as a selecting tool and in fact be of significantly more use than just
Line Feet Line Feet colouring in with- particularly with replaceable elements such as
mouths, hands and eyes.
Mouth Gloves Mouth Gloves
Trust me, and do as your told for now! ;-)
Pupil Pupil
How to create a colour palette
1. Press the Add Palette Button.
1 2
2. Rename the Palette.
How to clone a colour palette

3. Right click a Palette.
4. Click Clone…
5. Rename the Palette.

3 5
How to use a cloned palette 4

6. Select the Palette you want to be used in the scene.
7. Click the curved up arrow repeatedly until the clone sits

on the top of your palette list.
8. Use the down arrow to move the clone down the list.
7 8
6
And now…
Lets do some drawings!!!
The basic body parts
Upper Torso
Skull
A_Upper Arm
Chin
A_Sleeve
A_Ear
A_Lower Arm
B_Ear
A_Hand
A_Hair
B_Upper Arm
B_Hair
B_Sleeve
C_Hair
B_Lower Arm
B_Hand
Nose
A_Eye
Lower Torso
A_Eyebrow
A_Pupil
A_Upper_Leg
B_Eye
A_Lower_Leg
B_Eyebrow
A_Foot
B_Pupil
Mouth: Happy Substitutions A,B,C,D,E,F,X
Sad Substitutions A,B,C,D,E,F,X B_Upper Leg
B_Lower Leg
B_Foot
There. That is a (very basic) body. Let’s add some basic VPEGS…
Whole Character VPEG Upper Torso

Head VPEG
Skull A_Upper Arm
Chin A_Sleeve
A_Ear A_Lower Arm
B_Ear A_Hand
A_Hair B_Upper Arm

B_Hair B_Sleeve
C_Hair B_Lower Arm
B_Hand
Face VPEG
Nose Lower Torso
A_Eye
A_Eyebrow A_Upper_Leg
A_Pupil A_Lower_Leg
B_Eye A_Foot
B_Eyebrow
B_Pupil B_Upper Leg
Mouth B_Lower Leg
B_Foot
Now let’s change the body element’s pivot points…
1
2
3
4
How to change Pivot Points
1. Select the Pivot tool
2. Select the layer you want to change.
3. Click on the drawing where you want the pivot to be.
4. Select the next layer and repeat…
5. (For turnaround positioned rigs) If you want a different pivot

on different frames, click where you want the pivot to be on
each of the drawing layer’s frames.
TIP!
Pivots for Eyes
Position the eye ball’s pivot at the base rather than in the centre. You’re
going to be moving the character’s gaze by sliding the pupil around, not the
whole eye. The eye’s expression can be altered from neutral to alert by
stretching the scale of the eyeball from the base.
It’s a free bit of rigging just by changing the pivot point to a more useful
place!
1
Once that’s done, select all the drawing nodes in the node view and make
sure that they are covered by
The 2 Golden Rules

Set Properties for
Many Layers
They have no pegs yet, so once you’ve done that they should not be movable
when using the transform tool.
2
Try it.
Now let’s give them all pegs.
1 2
How to create pegs for all layers

1. Select all drawing layers you wish to have a peg attached to.
2. Add Pegs using the Add pegs button on the timeline mini
toolbar
Whole Character VPEG
Upper Torso
A_Upper Arm
A_Sleeve
A_Lower Arm
A_Hand
Now they should all have pegs
Collapse all the elements so they are easier to work with. B_Upper Arm
B_Sleeve
And now arrange the pegs in the node view so that the hierarchical B_Lower Arm
structure matches the flow like this: B_Hand
Neck
Head VPEG
Skull
Chin
A_Ear
B_Ear
C_Hair
A_Hair
B_Hair
Face VPEG
Nose
A_Eye
A_Eyebrow
A_Pupil
You should now have a character which, generally speaking B_Eye
B_Eyebrow
moves around with all the hierarchies correct.
B_Pupil
It should look a little like this Blue Print… Mouth
Lower Torso
A_Upper Leg
A_Lower Leg
A_Foot
B_Upper Leg
B_Lower Leg
B_Foot
Blue Print
Raw
hmmm…
it’s all here, but...
...it’s a bit unwieldy.
Lets Tidy it up a bit…
Blue Print
Pass Through Composited
Better.
By using Pass through

composites, we’re able to
collect parts of the rig
together without really
affecting the rig.
Still could be improved

though.
Blue Print
Backdropped
Much Better.
By using Backdrops,
you can kind of work out
where things are at a glance.
Blue Print
Grouped
This is the ultimate in

organisation: groups
It can get a little awkward

to work with later, but I
generally prefer it as it’s
less cluttered to look at
Shape Unions with a little extra spice
Got your head around Shape Unions?
Good.
Want to know how to join shapes to form a union AND preserve those little fiddly
bits and pieces that make them look as if they are actually three dimensional
instead of two?
Blue Print Shape Unioned Arm
This is a variant of the shape

union tree.
With the exception of the

Sleeve which is moved
forward in z by its peg, all
the pieces of the arm are
arranged, not by pegs, but
by the order they are placed
on the Composite.
Overlay Line Colour
The change needed to make things look

a little more ‘3D’ is to be made on the
Overlay art layer.
If you made the shape using the

‘lozenge’ method, creating an invisible
line as mentioned earlier, is the best and
easiest way to do this bit.
The gap is positioned at the elbow.

The overlay lines will ‘bite’ into the
eventual shape union.
Complete art
Blue Print Shape Unioned Arm
You’ll see that the lower

Arm’s Overlay Art is put on
the left most side of the
arm’s Comp order- placing
it onto the top of the arm’s
artwork.
And that’s it.
You want more?
Seriously, do you?
This actually is a legitimate question.
For basic projects, this rig will do everything you ever need it to do.
It has grouped hierarchies with pivots that are always going to be in the
right places with the ability to shuffle elements in Z-depth AND you can
add as many drawing subs as you want to each element in the rig with
everything moving at the same time when editing, giving you a huge
amount of customisation on the fly.
Now If you want to get onto the more advanced stuff, well read on....
12
11 11
9 9
7 7
6
Turnaround Rigs
I tend to think of the positions of a character turnaround like a clock face, with 7, 9 and 11 o clock flipped for the other side.
Making Julio into a turnaround rig really isn’t too difficult at all.
It just requires a bit of draftsmanship. Any body part you’ve created, will just require a little bit more work- I.E. more drawings!
There are no limits on how many positions you can create of your character- usually the favourite is about 5 with maybe the odd
allowances made for asymmetrical areas of the design such as hair, or a scar, or a peg leg or something.
The underlying structure of the rig stays exactly the same. It’s the imagery and the pivots that change. Nothing else.
But what do I actually do?
Ok calm down. Here’s the principle.
You’ve completed the character’s 6’o’clock position, right?
He’s finished.
First, collapse the character in the timeline so only one bar is visible.
Then Extend the Exposure of the timeline to say frame 10 maybe.
Now you go to say frame 2 in the timeline, and hit duplicate drawing.
This makes a complete facsimile of every single drawing you made on

Position 6’o’clock is For position 9’o’clock, this character’s
frame one. You can now either erase this new artwork entirely, or
completed nose and eyes are exactly the same.
manipulate it into the new artwork required for position 2. Even the body is identical.
It’s only the skull, mouth, neck & B_Hair
In the few initial stages your character will appear odd- with say- a 9 ‘o’ that actually have new artwork!
clock face and a 6 ‘o’clock mouth, but just go through all the layers one
by one, changing the artwork and their drawing pivots.
Eventually you’ll have your character completely remade but in the new
starting position.
No change to the rig structure AT ALL
Profile Mouths
So when he opens his mouth, you can see a load of skull

can you?
You need a cutter to remove it.
There are a myriad of different ways of doing this, some

of which I’ll demonstrate later on.
The general gist is to use a colour of some kind or a

sublayer’s contents to cut the contents of the head.
I tend to use a garish colour like lime green for cutter

colours as it’s really obvious when they aren’t connected
up correctly!
The Library of Puppets, poses, perambulations & paraphernalia
So you now want to actually call upon these various Turnaround

poses as and when you need them. How?
Again. This is super easy, but not obvious.
You utilise the Library to store the different Turnaround poses, and
drag them into the scene when needed.
The Library is there to store characters, backgrounds, node groups

and pretty much anything else for you to use and reuse at any time
like a kind of self assembled kit you can just drag and drop into your
project.
Harmony automatically locks the library every session to prevent

accidental deletion and alteration, so remember, when you want to
access a folder in the library, right click it and select ‘Right to
Modify’.
There are 3 main ways you use it for character work. These are...
To store the entire puppet
The easiest way to do this: is to collapse the puppet in the timeline then drag the title of the puppet into your library.
To store puppet poses
To do this, you collapse the puppet’s timeline. Create a keyframe for the pose you want by hitting ‘Add Keyframe’- This will create a
keyframe for every single element of your puppet. If you don’t do this- your puppet will not copy EVERY bit of keyframe info to recreate that
pose elsewhere, and it might look pretty weird when you use it later. Copy and paste the collapsed frame into the Library.
To store puppet animations
Either collapse the puppet, or a part of the puppet such as the head, making sure every element you wish to store is selected and keyframed.
Make sure the start of the animation section has a keyframe for every element, for like the pose storage I mentioned, if this isn’t there, your
animation may get of to a funky start when using it later. Select the range you want, then copy and paste the range into the Library.
To reuse puppet model templates
Just drag the template from the library into the timeline, Node view or Camera View
To reuse puppet template Sequences
Just drag the template from the library into the relevant area of the timeline- frame or frame range.
TIP! Fine tuning stored stuff
After storing, you may benefit from removing certain keyframes or drawing
subs from the stored template so that certain elements for the entire puppet
aren’t forced onto the user every time such as mouth positions or a flapping
piece of hair or something.
To edit a template. Right click it in the library and select ‘Edit Template’
The usual things to watch for are:
• The General Transformation information for the entire puppet such as

Scale, Rotation and Position- often found in the root peg of the character.
• Mouth Positions.
• Hand Positions.
• Blinks.
TIP!
When storing whole
character templates
When storing whole characters, its a good idea to do the following:
1. Delete all but the first frame of the timeline and make sure the first frames
are properly exposed and has a keyframe FOR EVERY LAYER.
2. Make the scene one frame long so the Library can generate a useful
thumbnail for future reference, quickly.
3. Give the stored Template a version number. Trust me, you’ll never get to
Character_FINAL- there’s always something to tweak!
Warning!
Template poses and animations

are sensitive
When you store whole characters, EVERYTHING is stored- Unused drawing

substitutions, all keyframes, palettes- nothing is left.
When storing Animations and Poses however, only the stuff actually
SELECTED is stored, so it’s important you don’t confuse the two storage
methods up as they appear very similar when you are first learning!
Another note is that any animation or pose you make will only be able to be
used by a model who’s rig structure and naming IS EXACTLY THE SAME!
Fairly recently, ToonBoom have improved the way Harmony uses pose
information, so you can alter the node tree a little and things will still work,
but keep this in mind once you start letting animators get hold of puppets.
If you fiddle with the original puppet’s structure too much- BANG! There goes
your bank of reusable poses and animations…
Bendy limbs
So you want bendy limbs do you? In that case, what kind of bend do you want?
Bone-like. (Bone) Hose-like. (Curve) Shape-like. (Envelope) Sheet-Like. (Free Form)
There is no set way regarding the creation of deformation limbs. What you must bear in mind however is two fold:
How quickly can they be animated?
How well can they be animated?
The Deformation toolbar
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Deformations off and on switch
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Select a different deformation chain if there is more than one

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Rename the current deformation chain for the selected element

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Create an alternative deformation chain for the selected element

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Reset the selected deformation point to the original point

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When using curve and Envelope deformations this allows you to manipulate points using a box
s
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First select the character you want, then use this to manipulate all deformations inside
fo
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First select the element you want to show, then use this to manipulate a deformation chain
n
First select the element you want to deform, then use this to create or edit a deformation chain
Here are the 4 different Deform Limb methods for
you shown step by step.
Each method is shown with a complete blueprint
Remember to look at the blueprints carefully.

Each method has subtle differences between
connections, so keep your eyes peeled for them.
1 2 4
How to create a Bone Limb
1. Select Upper Arm
3 2. Press the Rigging Tool
3. Select Bone Deformer
5 6 7
4. Click the top of the Arm
5. Click the Elbow
6. Click the Wrist
7. Make adjustments if needed by dragging

the various points. If you accidentally
create another point, just hit undo.
8. Attach the LowerArm-P to the bottom of the
8 9 newly formed Deformation group.
9. Connect a Kinematic Output to the

LowerArm-P and the Hand-P to stop the
Hand from Deforming
10. Connect things together using the BluePrint

as a guide.
Now an oft overlooked essential but boring bit-
A A. Select the Advanced Animation rotate tool.
B. Drag the pivot (which is now somewhere

totally wrong) over to the correct place.
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B How to Rig in Sweet Harmony - Created by Oli Putland Page 153 of 352
Blue Print Bone Limb
Manually Add This
Interior of Deformation Group
The Deformation Group controls

everything underneath it until a
kinematic output is placed in the
chain.
This stops the hand becoming

deformed.
1 2 3
How to Create a curve limb
1. Select A_Upper Arm 4
2. Press the Rigging Tool
3. Select Envelope Deformer. (YES. THE ENVELOPE

DEFORMER. Trust me it’s virtually the same as the
curve deformer, but without an immovable first point)
4. Click and drag from the shoulder to the elbow.
5. Click and drag from the elbow to the shoulder. 5 6

6. Click and drag back from the wrist to the elbow.
7. Make adjustments if needed by dragging the various

points. If you accidentally create another point, just
hit undo.
8. Connect things together using the BluePrint as a

guide.
A. Select the Advanced Animation rotate tool. 7 A

B. Drag the pivot (which is now somewhere totally
wrong) over to the correct place.
Blue Print Curve Limb
Manually Add This

Interior of Deformation Group
The Deformation Group controls

everything underneath it until a
kinematic output is placed in the
chain.
This stops the hand becoming

deformed.
How to create an envelope
Limb
1 2 3 1. Select A_Upper Arm

4 3. Select Envelope Deformer
4. Click the top of the Arm
5. Click and drag around the ONLY THE

'A_UPPER ARM’ PART of the limb, each time
dragging a little towards the last point
5 6
6. To join the deformation shape together, hold
Option/Alt and click the original point
7. Make adjustments if needed by dragging the

various points. If you accidentally create another
point, just hit undo.
8. Click the transformation tool and muck about

with it to test it.
9. Click undo so all is neat again.
7 8
10. Repeat steps 2-9 with A_Lower Arm
11. Connect things together using the BluePrint as

a guide.
A Now an oft overlooked essential but boring bit-
A. Select the Advanced Animation rotate tool.
B. Drag the pivots for both arm parts (which

are now somewhere totally wrong) over to
the correct place.
Blue Print Envelope Limb
Interior of Deformation Groups.

You may have more Curves
The Envelope and Free form Limbs are moved

around in the same way before you had deformers
attached.
These deformers change the shape of the upper

and lower parts of the limb, individually.
1 2 4 How to create a Free-
Form Limb
1. Select Upper Arm
3 3. Select Free-Form Deformer
4. Click the top line of the Upper Arm
5 6 7 5. Click away from the left of the Upper Arm
6. Click the base line of the Upper Arm
7. Click away from the right of the Upper Arm
8. Make adjustments if needed by dragging
8 the various points. If you accidentally

create another point, just hit undo.
9. Click the transformation tool and muck
9 10 11 about with it to test it. It’s the elbow that’s

the main mover.
10. Click undo so all is neat again.
11. Repeat steps 2-10 with Lower Arm
12. Connect things together using the

BluePrint as a guide.
A A. Select the Advanced Animation rotate tool.
B. Drag both pivots (which are now

somewhere totally wrong) over to the
correct place.
Blue Print Free-Form Limb
Interior of Deformation Groups.
The Envelope and Free form Limbs are moved

around in the same way before you had deformers
attached.
These deformers change the shape of the upper

and lower parts of the limb individually.
Warning!
sub-Layer order tangles

There are times when dealing with more complicated rig setups where you’ll
be nudging things around in the Z axis quite happily and then one part of the
rig never seems to make sense. No matter how hard you try, you can’t seem
to reorganise a little invention you came up with in the z axis.
Like a strange pack of cards that never seem to order themselves, no matter
how hard you try.
Remember this:
Each drawing element occupies a set space in Z depth space- like how real
life objects behave.
Each sublayer occupies a set space in the comp’s order. More like a page
position in a book.
Once you start mucking about with the two subtly different positioning
methods you might find one isn’t quite compatible with the other.
This is a fiddly concept, which isn’t explained easily, so I’m going to have to
go into this in more detail...
1
Mutual Peg Both Pegs share the PEG PEG
Z position
same Z depth
Drawing Drawing
When Sublayers Overlay Line

occupy the same area
Line Overlay
2
Sub Layer
Underlay
in Z depth, the manual
Shuffling
shuffle kicks in. Colour
The manual shuffle is Underlay Colour
determined using the
COMP as a makeshift
book order of layers
comp
3
Sub layer This organisation is
then consolidated into
Consolidation the one final point in Z
Comp
4
Finally, all pegs are organised into
Z space Z space in a predictable way,
Shuffling irrespective of how many COMPS
are passed through
Master Comp
Another way of looking at it…
Line Line
Overlay Overlay Drawing
Drawing
Underlay Underlay
Imagine both your hands representing 2 complete Drawings.
Now imagine every finger represents a SubLayer of a Drawing.
Front Back
If we place our fingers like this, you can see the way Harmony treats two Drawings
placed on any Composite when the Drawings occupy the same space in the Z axis.
comp
Front Back
Interlace your fingers.
This is how Harmony figures out how to organise Sublayers

when they are shuffled and occupying the same space in Z.
comp
Z axis depth
Now move one hand away from you and the other towards you.
Now the sublayer shuffling is irrelevant as they now occupy different spaces in Z.
Whatever Drawing is closer to the camera is the one that is on top.
comp
comp comp
Z depth Composite Order

still flows Doesn’t flow
comp
Z depth information travels through to the rest of the node tree via Pass-Through Composites.
But Comp order does not travel through the node tree.
Drawing Substitutions with Deformation substitutions
If you create a character whose drawing substitutions become so extremely different to each other that the artwork is no-longer
compatible with a deformation that’s been applied to it, it might be worth adding an alternative deformation chain for the new
extreme drawing substitution.
It’s pretty simple to do. You just hit ‘Create New Deformation Chain’.
2 1
This will not remove the original, but the selected element will suddenly snap into an original pose if deformed, waiting for you to
create a brand new deformation based on the new drawing.
The current drawing sub will be associated with whatever Transformation chain you select by default.
You can then select whatever Transformation chain you wish to associate with that drawing at any time using the pulldown menu.
Function Stitching
Personally, this is one of my favourite things to do now.
You know how a VPEG allows us to gather together elements and manipulate them ‘remotely’ using a graphical
‘handle’?
What if there was a way to do this, with say part of a Deformer.
I mean, just one point of one?
I’m not explaining myself very well. Let's have another crack at it…
Here is a piece of cloth comprised of two drawings
which roll around a character and you want to give the
impression it’s actually ‘attached’ together somehow
without having to manually line things up all the time.
When transforming one point, Harmony automatically

transforms the point on the other drawing deformation
at the same time.
Or maybe you just want to manipulate certain

deformer points a lot without enabling
deformers all the time by using a VPEG.
This has the advantage of allowing you to

manipulate deformers in subtly different ways
that deformers on their own can’t manage.
Interested now?
Over to you, Bon Bon...
How to stitch functions together
1 2 6 7
3 4 8 9
5 10
1. Go to the element in the Node view you 6. Find the Element in the node view you wish
wish to Stitch FROM first. to stitch to and open its Layer Properties.
(This can be anything- eg: Deformer to Peg.
2. Find the relevant value which will have
Peg to Drawing etc…)
it’s companion stitched from- in this
case a curve’s X axis value. 7. Find the relevant value we want to stitch to.
3. Click the Function's menu button 8. Click the Function’s menu button.
4. Select Create Bezier 9. Select Create Bezier
5. Select Copy Function Link 10. Select Paste Function Link.

Epic Arms
Arms, unlike legs, do a lot more moving around the body than legs do. One arm can go behind and in front of the
torso- often at the same time.
The only way to allow something like this to happen is through the full use of sublayers which will have two pegs to
position them in two z depths, but giving the illusion that the arm is travelling towards us in space- from back to
front.
Now depending on the complexity of the character you are rigging, you may or may not need to do this at all. There
are many different methods to do a similar job, but by and large, arms have a tendency to cross the torso and the
other body parts at times you don’t expect, so it’s best to build this into your puppet from the off.
Upper arm
Overlay Line Colour Underlay
Here are the Sub Art layers for each part of Lower arm
the arm as well as the body.
This is like the Shape Union enhancement

stuff mentioned earlier, but on steroids.
There may be a different way of doing this,

but after stripping things back as much as
I can, this is the best, quickest and most
CPU efficient way I can think of at present.
Overlay Line Colour Underlay
Body
Blue Print
Epic Arms
Ok. This one looks a bit more

complex!
Let’s break it down into

groups and work from there.
Blue Print Upper Arm
Let’s start with the upper arm
3 2
1
We’ll split the drawing into the overlay,
colour & underlay layers.
2
Also the entire drawing’s art is included
pumped out too
3 And of course, the peg information from the

deformations into the lower arm
1
Blue Print Hand
1
now the hand
3
As the input into this is from a deformation, we
2
1 need to add a Kinematic Output to stop the hand
from deforming too.
2 We need this peg’s z function to drive the

Shifting of the Lower arm’s sublayers
So we copy the hand peg’s z axis function and
3 paste it to the lower arm’s peg transformation

peg.
Blue Print Lower Arm
now the lower arm.

5
1
Again. split the drawing into the
overlay, colour & underlay layers.
3 4
2 2
And again the entire drawing’s art is
included pumped out too
3
And of course, the peg information
from the deformations
4 The peg transformation nudges the lower Arm’s split

art forward and backwards and not the whole art
1 5 The peg transformation’s Peg’s z value is ‘Function

Stitched’ from the hand peg’s z value.
Blue Print All (Grouped)
Finally, it all
goes together
Both Underlay arts are comped
1 together (Non Passthrough) and

placed before the body
The complete art of each Arm

part is comped and placed behind
2
the body
1
2
3 The rest is arranged as shown
Blue Print Both Arms (Grouped)
And when you’re

happy, with one arm,
you can put two arms
together, like this.
Then have a lie down!
Epic arms can
be tamed
Hey there.
Now I advice you to take a look at the very first ‘EPIC ARMS’ Blueprint.
The one with both upper and lower arm bits and pieces on.
Click here to take another look at it.
I think it’s actually easier to follow than all the later blueprints are, but
Oli had to separate stuff into Groups to explain it all!
It’s the ultimate in shuffling sublayers, so take solace in the fact that
once you get this, a HUGE technique has been learned which can be
adapted for many more uses than just Arms.
You just use your imagination.
You’ll be ok!
Warning!
Not all cutters are created equal
When using cutters in any scene, it makes a huge difference to the usability of
the rig depending on how you cut with them.
See these two node views:
This uses a separate cutter node.
This uses the straight-through cutter technique.
They both do the same job… Or do they?
Lets take a look at the bounding boxes when animating with them then…
Ah… Big difference.
Keep an eye on this- cutting the wrong way can bite your animators on the
bum later, particularly when using them in complex MC structures.
For example: You don't want character sized bounding boxes appearing
when you move a wrinkle on a character’s chin!
Is it okay to IK?
Just in case you might not know, IK stands for Inverse

Kinematics.
Me either.
It describes the situation where you want a chain of

bones- often found in legs to operate in reverse to how FK
they normally flow.
For example, normally one thinks of the pelvis having

control of the leg and the leg controls the foot. Certainly
this is the case in a run- the foot goes where the leg
goes when in hot pursuit.
Ah, but when a foot placed on the ground, the tables are
turned and the foot stays static, and leg moves from it, so
as an animator, it would be really good if the foot stayed
were it was and the legs actually bent depending on
where the foot was placed, and not the pelvis for a
change.
Now most of the time, animators want to be able to iK

change how the hierarchies work on-the-fly. One minute
a character’s limb is. FK- forward kinematic, then IK.
There is more than one way of doing this and it largely

depends on the style of limb that you have decided to
make.
The 4 methods of IK
There are 4 different methods of Inverse Kinematics that I know of as yet.
1 The IK Tool Method

Easy setup. For Peg/Drawing Limbs.
2 The deformation Methods

Medium setup. For Bone Limbs. And for Curve Limbs
3 The constrainer Method

Medium setup. For Peg/Drawing Limbs.
4 The peg gate Method

Advanced setup. For Peg/Drawing Limbs and beyond.
1 The IK Tool Method
Easy setup. For Peg/Drawing structured Rigs.
I should say at this point that the IK tool is not what I personally will be using
in near future to create IK limbs.
It’s a unique method of animator rig manipulation, which requires a certain

amount of training to get good at.
Bone-like. Hose-like.
As a brief description, the IK tool requires no real setup as such, as it (Bone) (Curve)
automatically acts as a kind of reverse Transform tool, inverting the node
tree’s chain of command when you move body parts.
The tricky bit involves the ongoing process of limiting certain points of
movement while using it by pressing Shift and clicking the required part.
After experimenting with it, I can say that it is a technique that would
certainly benefit basic rigs as it requires no immediate setup, but bear in Shape-like. Sheet-Like.
mind that animators may not quite understand how to use it. (Envelope) (Free Form)
I won’t explain all of it, as essentially it requires practice and

experimentation to make it work, which I can’t offer.
However the limited advice I can give is as follows:
The IK Tool
Bone Selection Mode

Allows you to select the bone easily
Basic Rig Structure
Shift ‘Click’
Joint Lock
IK Manipulation Mode
Allows you to move the bones around
Shift ‘Click’
Orientation Lock
All Chain Mode
This is the best way to figure out how
to mess about with the IK chain
system, at first. It behaves in a way
that makes some kind of sense!
2 The deformation Methods
Medium setup. For Bone limbs. And for Curve Limbs.
This is actually quite quick to setup, and is a good balance between speed Bone-like. Hose-like.
and ease of use. (Bone) (Curve)
It’s probably the most concise of all the IK setups, and is the easiest to learn.
It does however have its limitations- this will not work on the sort of arms
and legs that use Deformers to shape them rather than operate a limb’s
hinge such as the Envelope or the Freeform Arm.
Essentially the method of making this setup starts in exactly the same way
Shape-like. Sheet-Like.
as the Bone or Curve limb as mentioned in a previous chapter.
(Envelope) (Free Form)
It's the addition of an IK alternative that changes the setup a little bit.
There are 2 versions of this method which achieve subtly different results.
How to ik using the curve deformation method
Okay, let’s start with an easy one.
I almost didn’t include this, but its subtle uses are actually worth bringing to your attention
2 3 1. Select the leg
2. Create a curve limb deformation chain using

the ENVELOPE tool as mentioned in the
Bendy Limbs chapter.
3. Link the nodes together using the Blue Print

on the next page.
Blue Print
Curve Deformation IK method
This is as simple as it gets.
A kinematic output to stop the

foot getting distorted by the
deformer and Voila!
You can move the limb to any

position and it will just stay
there like a piece of wet pasta.
How to Ik using the Bone Deformation method
Here we go. Now this swappable method is perhaps the most convenient and easiest to rig.
It’s also the easiest for animators to swap from FK to IK on the fly as it just uses Drawing Substitutions to do it.
1. Duplicate the Drawing you wish to rig. For the

1 purposes of this tute, I’m showing you two
different arrow directions for clarity, but you will
just have an identical image of course.
2. Create a deformation chain using the Bone
2 3 5 Tool. Do the FK leg first. Start from the groin

and make your way to the ankle.
3. Select the IK Drawing on the timeline.
4. Click the Create New Deformation Chain

Button
4 5. Create a deformation chain for the IK leg next.
Start from the ankle and make your way to the
groin.
6. Click the Rename Transformations Button
6 7 8
7. Name each Transformation, accordingly.
8. Go into the node view and link things up as

shown in the blueprint:
Blue Print
Bone Deformation IK method
FK flow FK flow
IK flow
For the FK drawing, the foot

has to be at the end of the chain,
so make sure the output flows in
the usual way with a Kinematic
output to the foot to stop it
being deformed.
For the IK Drawing, since the

deformation doesn’t touch the
foot at all, a Kinematic output
isn’t needed.
3 The constrainer Method
Medium setup. For any Peg/Drawing limbs.
This is a bit more advanced, but it’s super easy to use once you put it
together. Bone-like. Hose-like.
(Bone) (Curve)
When animating, it behaves very much like the ‘Curve’ Deformer method I
showed earlier- The joints stay in their places like a wet piece of pasta.
Except using this method, you can actually deform the limbs to more
interesting shapes instead of just the curve since the leg joints are not using
a deformer to get into position.
This method heavily uses VPEGs to make it work, and they have to be Shape-like. Sheet-Like.
created in a slightly different way to how you would normally, so pay close (Envelope) (Free Form)
attention to Bon Bon, when he instructs you.
How to ik using constrainers 1. Create Artwork for each limb part and make sure that the artwork
in in the correct position on a drawing level first without the aid of
pegs. As a tip, it is worth deleting pegs you may have created for
1 2 these drawings just to make sure.
2. Move the pivots to their usual places using the pivot tool.
3. Create a peg for each part of the limb.
4. Drag 2 Two Point Constraints out from the Node Library and
place them into the positions as seen on the Blue Print on the
next page.
5. Drag 3 Pegs into the node view and connect them to the nodes
as shown on the Blue Print, and label them accordingly.
3 4
6. Use the Advanced Animation Rotate tool to move the pivots of
the 3 pegs into the corresponding positions of Top, Knee and
Ankle.
5 7. Create 3 VPEGS all with the same artwork- a semi-transparently
8
filled circle and a cross
6 7 8. Connect them to the Joint Pegs as shown on the Blue Print.
9. Drag the artwork of each VPEG so that the cross overlaps the
drawing’s current pivot. DO NOT USE the translation tool. Use
9 10 the Black Pointer (Select tool). We want to move the artwork, not
the drawing node itself.
10. As a final touch, change the Layer Properties of the Two Point
Constraints to taste. Try mucking about with the Volume Modifier
for a start. If you muck around too much and ‘ruin’ it, just delete
the constrainer and plug in a fresh one!
Blue Print Constrainer Method
Constrainers are logical and

essentially simple.
But they can fox all of us. Even me.
If things make no sense, Delete the pegs

going into a constrainer and
Start again if you like.
Constrainer IK/FK setups tends to

make the knee ‘pop’ out when
animating, so you occasionally need
to adjust the limb parts manually.
Just shift them a bit using the

translate tool when animating.
4 The peg gate Method
Advanced setup. For Peg/Drawing Limbs and beyond.
Bone-like. Hose-like.
This one is the most advanced. (Bone) (Curve)
It can also be quite fiddly to initially set up but it has the advantage of being
the most ‘upgradable’. You can use some of the structures in this node
formation to build all kinds of wacky things in the future, so it’s worth
learning, even if you don’t decide to use this method in the future.
This is the ‘purest’ form of IK- in that it is not relying on any kind of gimmick
Shape-like. Sheet-Like.
to create the structure. It really is as raw as it gets, allowing for more fancy
(Envelope) (Free Form)
nuanced areas of rigging to possibly be contained with in it.
How to IK using the Peg gate method
1 2
1. Create the artwork for the Upper Limb, Lower Limb & Foot. 3
2. Drag 3 Transformation Gates from the Node View and place
them as shown in the Blue Print overleaf.
3. Drag 6 Pegs and place them as shown in the Blue Print, and
label them accordingly. Take care that the FK and IK
4 FK
versions occupy the same entry dot on each Transformation
Gate. I.E. if FK pegs enter on the Left, ALL FK's should enter Ik
on the left.
4. Using the Advanced Animation Rotate Tool, drag the pivots

of the IK and FK pivots to their correct places- Remember: 6
FK- top down. IK- Bottom up.
5. To make sure the Gates all switch in unison, function stitch

the Upper Limb’s ‘LOCAL TARGET GATE’ function to all the
other’s as shown in the earlier chapter.
6. Make sure the IK Foot’s peg is connected to the Character’s

Master peg, otherwise it will be a total orphan and left 5
behind when you move the whole puppet around!
Blue Print IK Peg Gate method
The transformation gates swap any node structures that

are plugged into them.
You can use them for all sorts of things including FK-IK
swapsies.
Once the gates are functions

stitched, To swap from FK to IK,
Change the value in the Local
target gate from 0 to 1.
Ik’an't do this
Creating IK chains can be a bit of a mind messer.
A few tips which might help you get your head round this-
Create the Function Stitch EARLY when using the IK Peg Gate
method. This will ensure that all the Gate’s outputs sync together,
and prevent a few frustrating setup moments.
Keep the node view CLEAN. If it starts getting messy, it can make a
potentially confusing situation even worse. Use Backdrops to
clarify what things are doing if that helps.
When creating the Deformation IK Method, I would urge you to

label things clearly and test as you go to make sure the labels are
correct! Oli has gotten things wrong many times while making
rigs- its normal!
Ignore Bon Bon’s smugness!
Warning!
Beware of drifting pivots

There is a danger, particularly with envelope deformed shapes that
eventually their pivots of origin can become forgotten due to the constant
shape shifting of the drawing so the base mechanism of the character Original Pivot New Added Pivot
starts to become harder and harder for the animator to wrangle.
During a particularly heavy shot, it might be helpful for an animator to

add an extra peg which of course has a new, un-keyframed pivot which
when used in this way can virtually ‘reset’ the original pivot, allowing Peg added by animator to
you to get the animation done. I would not recommend that Riggers do finish the shot.
this- their job is to keep the original puppet as ‘clean’ as possible, but if
Not advisable as a modus
an animator needs an extra bit of help half way during a shot to just get
operandi, but sometimes,
the shot done, then there usually is nothing to stop them, provided a
needs must.
master controller is not involved in that part of the puppet.
Caution though: Adding pegs at that stage may break a master

controller’s internal map, or stop poses and imported animation from
working due to the change in rig structure.
Hands
Depending on the complexity of your character, you have two choices when it comes to Hand rigging.
Which route you take is entirely up to you. Both have their advantages and disadvantages.
Fully Rigged Drawing Substituted

• You can create almost any pose with a subtlety • Very simple to set up as its only a set of
of movement not easily achieved with Drawing drawings
Subs
• The quickest way of animating hands-
• They are quick to animate into a variety of PROVIDED the hand position is already drawn
bespoke positions
• They stay on-model- if a library of hands must
• You can store the positions into the Library for be pre-approved
future reuse
• Depending on the character design, they can • If you need a bespoke hand position, this can
be very complicated to rig and animate take time to create
• Unless a library of positions is created, moving • For some positions- particularly for more
them from pose to pose might be seen as a complex characters, the hand’s perspective
time-consuming indulgence can be at odds with the rest of the body
• The never-ending mountain of hand

substitutions can become overwhelming
TIP!
Auto-autopatched Hands
For Drawing Substitutions, you need a method of creation which is as fast as
can be, since you may very well be drawing bespoke positions on the fly.
As such, you don’t want to be separating the fill from the hands in order to join
it up to the rest of the arm every single time. In an ideal world, you should be
able to just create the artwork on one sublayer, and Harmony magically will
join it to the rest of the arm.
Well there is a way of doing this, and since it’s just for two body parts, the CPU
should be able to handle this, perfectly.
I’ll ask Bon Bon to show you how to do it…
How to create an auto-auto patch
1. Make sure your character’s palette is using a ‘skin’ colour which will be
1
used on both the arm and hand.
2. Drag 2 Colour Overrides into the Node view and join things together as
shown in the Blue Print.
3. Open the Colour Override’s properties which will create automatic Line
Art
4. Select the Character from the palettes, then from colours, select ‘Line’
5. Click the tab ‘Render Selected Colours Only. 2

6. From the Pull down menu, select- Render Selected Colours.
7. Click the white triangular arrow pointing away from the Colours list.
8. Repeat stages 3-7 for the ‘Skin’ Colour Override.

3
4 5
6
7
Blue Print The Auto-AutoPatch #1
I wouldn’t recommend doing this too often,

as colour-overrides might be a bit CPU
heavy, but for a couple of hands- it’s great.
It means you can draw and fill and not

worry about separating the sublayers.
i’ve included a Layer-Selector node in there

as well and turned on just the Over and
Underlay layers.
just incase you want to add little details
which need to go over the arm every now
and then.
Blue Print The Auto-AutoPatch #2
This one is a little more CPU intensive as it

uses 3 cutters instead of 1,
but has the advantage that the hand

appears permanently connected to the arm.
No matter how far you move the hand in z

depth, the hand will ALWAYS appear joined
to the arm because it cuts the arm!
Send in the Clones
Remember when Jollop asked you to NOT CLONE ANYTHING?!
Well he’s generally right- certainly you don’t want to clone things accidentally, but if used
correctly, it can be a real asset to the rigging process.
The areas of rigging where Cloning can be useful are in body parts which have a double
such as Hands, Eyes, Feet, Arms, Legs and Ears.
By Cloning these parts, you are effectively halving your workload, and making sure that
any changes you make with one element are of course, automatically carried over to the
other one!
That being said, I would stress the following 2 pieces of advice:
1
DON’T COPY A DRAWING NODE!
That will clone the Drawing and

Timing which more often than not,
you won't want.
2
When Cloning…
Choose Edit>Clone:Drawings Only.
This way Drawing Substitutions are

the same, but their timing and order
on the timeline is unique for each
clone.
… make sure you label

the CLONE.
Otherwise confusion will

occur!
Heads
Heads are generally the most easy things to rig, as by and large it is a simple almost spherical shape with no long parts that require limb like
dexterity. Master Controlled heads are- in my opinion, the easiest part of the body to create MCs for as almost all the animation is done at the
rigging stage, and as such minimal forward planning has to be taken into account regarding how the animator will eventually use it. Rigging the
head has it’s tricky moments, but there is far less stressing out regarding how it will be used later. If it works when testing at the rigging stage, it is
likely to work first time at the animation stage as well.
Eyes
The general rule is that the eyes are small grouping of standard parts- Eyebrow, Eyeball, Pupil and sometimes Eye-bag.
The blinks can be controlled two ways.
• Either by one or two ‘blink’ layers which are ‘cut’ by the eye in
some way and are shifted up and down by the animator
• The other way is via a series of drawing substitutions, drawn either by the
animator or the rigger and are selected using the < & > keys to flick between
positions. Certainly animating blinks is a lot quicker using this method.
Separating the Colour and line art of the Eyeball is sometimes useful, as the colour art can be used to ‘cut’ the pupil and the blinks, stopping them
from overlapping onto the rest of the face.
Nose
Depending on the design, the nose can be either one piece or several.
Ultimately you have to think about how it will look from all angles and wether or not you have the shape dexterity to be able to manipulate
the pieces into any pose you need.
Front Profile
B B
A C AC
For really elaborate noses, you may even need to split it down the middle so one side can show in profile while the other side ‘disappears’
Mouth
This can be as simple or as complicated as you like.
You can have just one mouth layer, comprising of the Mouth, teeth and tongue.
Or you can have several layers comprising of one element each.
This can be handy for several reasons-
1. It is easy to create new mouth positions as the mouth ‘hole’ has fewer lines to
alter.
2. It allows for subtle changes of expression if all are individually deformable.
3. The teeth tend to look more ‘solid’
The most tricky aspect of rigging a mouth is when it comes to the 9 ‘o’ clock profile
position. As I suggested earlier, a new set of drawing substitutions may have to be
created for that pose in order for the whole thing to work, with some kind of cutter
to remove some of the character’s skull in the process.
If you plan on creating a Master Controlled mouth, that brings up another set of
problems and complications which I try to explain in the next main chapter when I
rig Bus Stop.
Blue Print Auto Mouth
Here is a variation of the auto-autopatch

technique mentioned earlier.
This way, you don’t have to separate

mouth information into component
parts (Line Colour art etc) when you
create new mouth shapes.
Palette
Synced Layers
There are times when you swap drawing substitutions for one part of your puppet, and you want other parts to swap with it as well.
For example, when changing the mouth positions, you may want the chin, jaw, teeth and tongue to change drawings to give the illusion of
one large drawing moving together.
For this, all you do is ‘Sync Layers’ and they can all shuffle around in harmony with each other at any time.
1
2
How to sync Layers together
1. Make sure your ‘Parent’ layer is created already.
2. Right click on the ‘child’ layer you want synced to the

parent layer and select Sync Layer With…
3. From the Pull down menu, select the ‘Parent’ layer you
wish to drive this child layer’s order.
4. Done. They are now synced together.
4
Mouth poses
If you wish to use Harmony’s built in Auto-Lip sync features, then you need to organise your mouths into a set of at least 8 different positions.
The Letters at the top are the reference letters which Harmony uses to figure out which mouth goes with which sound.
The Letters at the bottom represent the different sounds the mouths actually make (according to Harmony)
a B C D
Mmm SSd Ar AAH
E F G x
Eeh Oooh phf Mute
I’ve started getting into auto-lip sync, but only for certain projects as I feel it has it’s limitations for more refined work.
Either way, labelling your mouths in this way: A,B,C,D etc is a jolly good way of organising your mouths as it means that they are predictably
located when using < & > when the animator chooses them later on.
From To
Avoiding the crunch

I ran into the problem several times when rigging. Sometimes deformations just don’t pull around as far as you want them to.
Happily I discovered a very sneaky little solution which I’m going to let you in on now.
Deformations don’t like to compress, but they love to expand.
From To
How to create a non-ripped Deformation
1. Asses which direction you will pull the shape from the most. Is it vertical or horizontal?
2. Draw a shape that bears little resemblance to the shape you eventually want it to become with a general
orientation of vertical or horizontal. Make it as thin as the thinnest point you want the deformation to be.
3. Create an envelope deformation with same amount of points as the finished shape and in roughly the right
positions, vertically or horizontally.
4. Once completed, pull the deformation into the desired shape. You now have a much more pliant shape.
1 Push
2 Pull
3
4
1
3
2
How to create a very robust
deformed shape
1. Separate Colour and Line art.
2. Copy the Colour Art

4 5
3. Paste it into the Underlay layer
4. Create a circle or Rectangle around the colour art. Not too

big. Not too small.
5. Fill the area between the shapes and delete the original
shape. You’ll be left with the shape’s ‘negative’
6. Arrange things as shown in the Blue Print on the next page.
Blue Print Robust Deformer
I find this tip works

extremely well with
mouths and any shape
that needs to deform in
some of the most extreme
ways that can be.
KE
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O P
OW ST
H
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B Am
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o lled
ch
ara cter
So now we come to probably the most epic part of the book
Master Controllers
You may have seen them on the YouTubes at some point.
They appear to work miracles don’t they? Somehow, by moving a little dot around, you can make your character
move in a way that actually mirrors FULLY FLEDGED HOLLYWOOD FILM QUALITY CHARACTERS.
They are incredible, no two ways about it.
As I keep saying all the way through the book- there is NO right and wrong way to make anything.
However, there are several common things that people want master controllers to do…
To make Heads move around easily.
To make Lip-sync more nuanced and delicate
To turn the body around for easy posing.
A Master Controller is actually just a piece of javascript code which is either hand-coded, or created by one of Harmony’s MC wizards.
Grid
Slider wizard Stack
wizard wizard
In order to learn the ways of the Master Controller (or “MC” for short) you’ll need to gently learn how to plan for each wizard from easy to hard.
But before we start, I need to show you exactly what a Master Controller actually does.
The ‘Magic’ of a master controller
Ah! Here they all are. Resplendent in their magical caps.
Let’s be quite clear about this right now.
The Master Controller wizards are very clever chaps.
They take your keyframes and figure out a way to make the master controller node reproduce them in a form that is easier to operate later.
The Master Controller itself however… is dumb!
He is a master of illusion, nothing more.
He may give the impression he is Gandalf the white, but deep

down, he’s just a charlatan illusionist, making things move around
in EXACTLY the same way you’ve told him, only with more panache.
You create keyframes to move something around.
He creates keyframes to move something around.
You move something, cleverly.
He moves something, blindly.
Remember, you and the wizards have to tell him EXACTLY what you
want to move and how.
After all, all an MC does is spit back up recorded information that

you and the wizards have worked out together.
He has no brain, and therefore cannot work anything out for

himself.
The wizard system allows you to write a master
controller script without coding anything.
The Master controller then just refers to this script blindly,

without really understanding what it’s doing.
So in order to “program” it, you need to be incredibly

precise and almost surgical in your approach.
With that in mind, let’s start with good practices…
The Movement Rainbow
As you can see below, the main ways to manipulate any body part are split into 7 different function categories.
With these ingredients, you can choose which method or combination of methods you want to use to create your eventual master controllers.
So you may be asking,
“Why can’t I just use all 7, like normal?”
Come with me…
Lets take a mouth as an example
Imagine that Bon Bon writes the Master Controller script for the Head.
And imagine Jollop writes the Master Controller script for Lip-sync.
TEA M
M TEA c
HEA - syn
D Lip
Now bear in mind that the two MCs will BOTH need to control the Mouth in some form.
BonBon will need to move the Mouth from Jollop meanwhile needs to move the
place to place in order to give the illusion Mouth around for Lip-syncing.
of the Mouth being attached to the Head.
Imagine this is the timeline of your character’s Mouth artwork
TEA
Mouth timeline
M
HEA
D
TEA
M
HEA
D
TEA
Lip M
-sy
nc
TEA
M
HEA
D
TEA
Lip M
-sy
nc
TEA TEA
Lip M M
-sy H EA
nc D
TEA
Lip M
-sy
nc
Then imagine that every change written into an MC is in fact, a flag.
A change could be a Keyframe, or a Drawing Substitution swap
AND THEY’RE OFF!
All seems to be going well… ah but wait…
TEA
M
Mouth timeline
HEA
D
TEA
M
HEA
D
TEA
Lip M
-sy
nc
TEA
M
HEA
D
TEA
Lip M
-sy
nc
Lip
TE
AM c
-sy
n
AM
TE AD
HE
TEA
Lip M
-sy
nc
Notice in the Deform function track, both runners are trying to use it, causing a power struggle.
Once run through by that MC’s runner, it causes a “last-one-dominates” flag swap.
Whoever uses it last, dominates the function track.
M TEA
TEA Lip
-sy
M
EA D nc
H
In other words,
You shouldn’t have 2 MCs using

the same movement function!
Master Controller Sudoku
I usually plan ahead like this, using a set of tables allocating MC movement types to body parts.
Lip
HEAD Blinks
Sync
A B C D E F G A B C D E F G A B C D E F G
Eyes Eyes A B C D Eyes E F G
Pupil Pupil Pupil
Nose Nose A B C D F Nose
Mouth E F G Mouth A B C D Mouth
Eyebrow Eyebrow A B C D Eyebrow
Jaw E G Jaw A B C D F Jaw
Hair Hair A B C D F Hair
Skull E Skull A B C D F Skull
HEAD Blinks
A B C D E F G A B C D E F G
Eyes A B C D Eyes E F G
As an example, let’s look at the Eyes body part.
You’ll notice that the Eyes can be moved using Position, Rotation, Scale & Skew for the HEAD MC
Which then leaves Constraint, Deformation & Drawing Substitution for the BLINKS MC
So long as no 2 Master Controllers are using the same movement type to control a body part, the master controllers should
work in harmony with one another, instead of fighting against each other.
Slider
Wizard
Easy
Phew!
With that out of the way, let’s start having some fun!
Now the slider wizard is by far the easiest wizard to use and to plan for.
All it does is reads a sequence in the timeline’s exact order (eg. Frame
1,2,3,4,5 etc) and then reproduces it as a sliding joystick which the animator
can call upon to essentially ‘jog shuttle’ the recorded animation positions at
any stage.
This simple Master Controller is naturally adept at being used

for Blinking, Body Rotation, & even elaborate Lip Syncing.
Let’s create a master controlled ball with the slider wizard!
The Template Timeline
Ok, wait a minute! Before we start, the first thing to do is organise your timeline correctly, so that
you are not fighting against yourself when creating your MC. This will be referred to as the
Template Timeline.
• Create a whole drawing layer dedicated to marker points. Bon Bon will show you how to make
these on the next page.
• Create a FULL keyframe on frame 1. This • Create regular ‘crèche’ areas for testing
makes sure that every element is ‘Anchored’ your MC. This way you don’t accidentally
in a sort of position ‘zero’ before things mess up your timeline positions when you
start flying around magically later on. need to remake the MC via the wizard.
• Create FULL keyframes with gaps between them. Since the MC wizard only records the keyframes, the gaps
in-between frames are useful as they can help you visualise how the movement is going to be interpreted by
the MC when you actually use the slider.
How to create Marker Points on a layer
1. Right click a keyframe
Personally, I prefer creating marker
2. Select ‘Mark Frame’ points on a layer.
they are easier to manipulate, you can
3. Select a colour. store them in the library for later use
as a kind of template. They are more
4. You can drag the marked frame around as normal. Versatile and generally easier to work
with.
How to create Marker Points on a Timeline

1. Right click the sliver area in the timeline bar.
2. Select mark current frame.
3. Select the colour and create a comment.
4. Hit OK.
Let’s get started...
So the first test will involve a ball.
Just create a simple circle with an envelope deformer all the way around it.
A Test of Skill
As a test exercise, we are only going to use Deformers to move this

ball around.
No peg use at all, please. In other words, No translation tool moving

the whole ball around. Only to move the Deformer points.
If keyframes are accidentally created on the other movement tracks,

delete ‘em!
I want you to get used to using just using one movement method to
make MC’s, which sometimes goes against how you would normally
make something move.
We’ll get to the more advanced combo stuff later on.
How to create poses for the Add Keyframe
slider wizard
1. Make sure that Frame 1 has a keyframe for every

single layer by collapsing all the groups, selecting
them and hitting ‘Add Keyframe’. Let’s refer to this
idea as a FULL keyframe.
Collapse Group
2. Move over to a more distant number, eg: frame 20.
3. Start animating your ball from squashed to

stretched. For the purposes of this tutorial- ONLY
use the deformers to do it. Don’t move the whole
ball's peg using the Translate tool, just the points.
www.patreon.com/oli How to Rig in Sweet Harmony - Created by Oli Putland Page 240
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4. Use keyframes as ‘tent pegs’ to structure your
movement. The master controller wizard will only
record keyframes or changes to the drawing
substitutions, not the tweens in-between them, so
timing is largely irrelevant.
Keyframes to be recorded by the MC Wizard only, not the in-betweens
5. Once you are happy, create FULL deform

keyframes for the deform curves from the first
position you created on frame 20. This will clarify
instructions for the master controller. A keyframed
pose what we are aiming for, not a tween that looks
ok at a marked position.
Full Keyframes only for deformations
Full Keyframe for everything
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How to create an MC using
the Slider Wizard
6. Select every layer’s full range of the sequence

from start to end.
Collapse Group
7. Hit the Slider Wizard button.
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8. Adjust the settings to taste. These refer to the joystick itself.
Invert Direction- back to front order.
Horizontal layout- side to side slider.
Interpolate between poses- do you want a Stop-motion or Motion
keyframe effect when sliding
The node count

indicates how many
nodes the MC will
control. This is the range of frames
you just selected
The Attribute count
refers the total
amount of
functions it will
control.
Type in the name of your
For example, the Slider Master Controller
total position,
Rotation, scale, Skew
attribute values of a
peg would be 7
As Position is 3: X,Y,Z.
Scale is 2: X+Y
Rotation is 1
And Skew is 1)
These buttons are largely irrelevant,

except for the filter button which
minimises how many things the MC
controls in the selection.
You have to select them in the list first.
9. Create the MC script by hitting ‘Create'
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10. Select which Composite you wish the master
controller to attach to. (You cannot change
this unless you run the wizard again)
11. Set the save location (By default it’s in the

scene’s own ‘scripts’ folder which is the most
sensible place for it. If it doesn’t default there,
manually find that location)
12. Connect the Master controller node to a peg.
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13. Move the Master controller slider by selecting
the peg, then hitting the Advance Animation
Move Tool and dragging the arrows around.
Crèche area
14. Select a frame in the timeline AFTER the

animation you just created- in the crèche area.
15. Muck about with the slider to test how it’s

working for you.
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Refine,
refine,
Refine.
Now you may have mucked something up.
Even I, after all my master controllers STILL often get it wrong first time.
That’s the process.
You make one.
You see what you do and don’t like.
You make changes and try again.
This is normal. Don’t beat yourself up.
Turning Master Controllers On & Off
Show Controls Don’t be intimidated by this.
Hide Controls You don’t often need to use this window,

but if you have several MCs in a scene,
then It does actually come in handy.
Normally To show an MC, you have to

Where to search select it first- either in the Timeline or
Node view, then press the Show Controls
button.
Essentially this window just makes the

selecting and button pressing a little
Search bar easier. That’s all.
Results list
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Node Selection methods
When creating any Master Controllers, it’s advisable to select nodes en masse in a precise way.
It helps to select just parts of the puppet for timeline

manipulation so you are not overwhelmed by erroneous
information, particularly when creating MC’s.
I.E.: Do you really need to see composite_4 of the torso,

when you are creating a Master Controller for the Nose?
Since this can be very fiddly to do manually, and you often

need to do this more than once, it is worth creating some
method of repeated selection to make life easier.
Hard to navigate Easier to manage
Method 1
Select all nodes

This can be a useful way to selecting certain things fairly
quickly and easily, but it requires a bit of setting up.
If you add a certain set of letters of numbers to a series of

nodes- for example “HEAD_Mouth”, or “HEAD_A_Eye”, then
you can select all of the required nodes, by entering the
common name “HEAD” into the box and all the nodes with
“HEAD” in their title will be selected using this method.
Selection Only Mode
This is found in the lower left part of the timeline window.
This allows the timeline to show only the elements that have
been selected. Handy, but not permanent.
The moment you select something else, the timeline changes

what it shows.
Method 2
Tagged Nodes
Tagging Layers allows you to only see the tagged

layers on the timeline, which can be extremely
useful when you want to just see what you want to
move, and ignore all the clutter of erroneous
timeline material. And unlike Selection Only Mode,
Tagged Layers last until you quit the app.
View Tagged Layers
When you want to select nodes later, you just go to

‘View Tagged Layers’ in the bottom left part of the
Timeline view and then manually select any or all of
the layers that have been tagged.
Method 3
Selection Presets
The downside of using Tagged Nodes or just

manually selecting things is that you have to do set
this up every time you want things selected, which
can be very time consuming. Add Selected Nodes
However…
Selection Presets allows you to select a group of

nodes all at once from its menu.
From there, you can do what you like- tag them,

rename them. Move them all. Or just select them
ready for an MC Wizard.
And you can save the preset within the file!
The downside? Well, although the Selection Preset

script is already installed into Harmony, you have to
manually add the script into the toolbar first.
Over to you, Bon Bon…
1
How to use Scripts
1. Open the Scripting Toolbar by right clicking any toolbar and selecting ‘Scripting’.
2. Click ‘Manage Scripts’
3. Select your script on the left, then the centre, then move it to the actual Scripting Toolbar
by clicking the white triangular right arrow button.
4. When finished, the script will appear on the toolbar as a Cog. If you want to customise
the script’s Toolbar icon or Tooltip, click the Customise buttons and select the .PNG file
you want as the icon, or type the tooltip.
2
It’s worth creating toolbar
icons for any scripts you use,
3
as since they always appear as
the same cog, it can be
confusing to use otherwise.
How to install new Scripts
1
from Scratch
1. Open the Script Editor
2. Click ‘Import Script’
3. Select the Script- which will be written in JavaScript as

a .JS file.
4. Save it as ‘User' for general use, and ‘Scene’ for a per-

scene use.
2 3
4
You won’t have to do this for
the ‘selection presets’ script
as it is already built into
harmony.
I just though this would be

handy to know.
Select things TIP!
with Tags
Want to create a large Selection Preset easily?
Instead of holding CTRL or Command down for

selecting large amounts of nodes on an
individual basis which can be stressful and
almost impossible if you have to go in and out of
Groups to do so, just select a node, hit ‘G’ on
the keyboard and keep going like this, one by
one until you’ve got your complete selection-
tagged.
Then go to View Tagged Layers and all your

tagged nodes will appear.
All you have to do then is easily select the whole

Timeline list, which is much easier now, and
create a Selection Preset ready for future
selections!
Grid
wizard
Medium
Now that you’ve been able to muck around with the very concept of Master Controllers, time to
crank it up a notch by creating something that’s actually interesting using the Grid Wizard.
The Master controller produced in this method is a kind of joystick movement, similar to a game
console analogue stick, sliding around in both 2D planes- X & Y.
The Grid timeline works on a strange principle where time is bent up on itself. Where
movements of one part of the timeline blend with other parts of the timeline. It’s as if
causality takes a holiday and decides to whizz around future and history, making up
new bits of timeline as it goes along.
The sort of Master Controller this Wizard produces is very good for heads, since heads
don’t just slide from side to side, but they also roll up and down.
It’s also important to remember that this kind of MC can also be used for a variety of other things,
so don’t just think of this as ‘The Head one’. Experiment!
Grid Templates
So before we go on to what you actually do for a Grid Wizard, it’s important to set up things
as cleanly as you can first.
Yes, do things like I explained before in ‘The Template Timeline’ but for Grids it’s also important
to figure out where the head positions on the timeline are going to be in advance and create
some kind of plan to follow- maybe even a permanent plan of action for every Head MC you
create. Here the frame numbers are shown for the relevant head positions.
The ‘flipper’ peg
You don’t have to use a peg to flip all the head positions over, but as you may have
guessed, it effectively halves your workload!
All you do is place a peg at the point in your puppet that you
would like things to be flipped from. In the case of the head, it’s
usually the neck.
You must position the peg’s pivot correctly, otherwise the flip
may make the head ‘detach’ from the rest of the body.
Set the pivot at the dead centre of the

Flipped Element.
And then press the Flip

Horizontal Animation Button
The Flipper Peg’s Pivot is DEAD CENTRE
Mr Balloon Head
Now. Let’s start with a nice simple character’s head.
I’ve deliberately chosen something simple so that you

can grasp the finer points before we go on to the
more advanced stuff.
Essentially this is a balloon with some drawn

elements plastered across its form. When we move
the Master Controller’s Joystick around, the head will
appear to rotate 45 degrees from centre in every
direction.
This will be known as a 90º Head Rig
For these tutorials, we’ll focus purely on Peg based keyframes so only the first 4 functions of the movement rainbow will be used.
Peg
How to make 90º HEAD Poses
for the grid wizard
Make sure for Frame 01 there is a FULL

keyframe for every peg.
This will give every peg a ‘Ground Zero’ to

work from.
For the purposes of this tutorial, move the face

pegs using the methods mentioned: Position,
Rotation, Scale & Skew.
You can use Deformations and Constrainers, but

for this Tute, I would advise against it.
Learn this technique, gradually.
Let's use a clock face to reference face positions.

So 9 ‘o’clock is front on and 4 ‘o’clock is at a 45º
angle for example.
Create the poses for frames MID 9, MID 4
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Once you’re happy with the first 2 poses, make sure a
‘FULL’ keyframe is created for each position.
Now copy MID 9 & MID 4 Keyframes…
... and paste them into UP 9, UP 4 keyframes.
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Now reposition the elements from their ‘MID’ positions …
…to their ‘UP’ poses.
By doing things this way, it will make certain

movements easier to recreate rather than doing
them from scratch each time
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?
If at any time you want to get an idea of what a
movement will look like from any non-sequential
pose such as from MID 9 to UP 4…
...copy the pose MID 9...
... use the empty spaces to paste it into before UP 4.
The empty space between the pose markers will not

be recorded by the MC wizard, so it is useful only as
reference to us mortals, not the MC, who will never
know it was ever there.
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Finally, copy frames MID 9 & MID 4…
... and paste them into frames DOWN 9 & DOWN 4
Move the elements accordingly to appear correct.
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Make sure each Keyframe is a ‘FULL’ Keyframe.
Then select all the keyframes…
… and paste them into the other, soon to be flipped

positions.
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Select the Flipper Layer, and delete all the keyframes
from the ‘FLIPPED’ positions only.
In this example it’s from Frame 250 to 360
Go to the MID 9 of the new ‘Flipped’ positions.
Press the Flip Horizontal-Animation button.
Do this for every ‘Flipped’ position so they end up as

shown.
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Normal Flipped
Ultimately this should be the timeline you end up with.
How to create an MC using the
grid wizard
Select every element that will be manipulated by the

Master Controller. In this case it’s all the pegs, not the
drawings.
Since you may have to do this several times when

refining your MC, I would advise you to create a
Selection Preset which you can use to select all the
relevant nodes easily every time.
Now hit the Grid Wizard Button
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For the purposes of this tute, let’s create a fresh grid.
We’ll want a grid 4 points across and 3 points high.
Click OK.
Since the grid has a flipped moment of artwork, we don’t

want a transition from one flipped central point to the
other central point- otherwise you’ll get this kind of
paper flip happening which we don’t want.
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So we have to move the central points so they are
ALMOST on top of one another and Harmony won’t be
able to interpret a middle point between the 2 central
positions.
You should end up with something that looks like this.
There are two dots in the centre, but really close to each
other, so you really have to zoom in to see the
difference!
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Now select the first MID position on timeline.
Mine was on Frame 100
Then select the relevant dot on the Wizard Grid. The

Select Frame dialog box should appear, and should
show the very frame you’ve selected on the timeline.
Hit OK
Do this for every point on the grid.
The central flipped positions might be tricky to see, so

it’s worth zooming in using the + magnifier to really get
in there.
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The Monitored Attributes section refers to any element
that is to be recorded by the MC Wizard. In this case it’ll
be each Peg’s Position, Rotation, Scale and Skew
values. If they remain unchanged through out the MC
timeline, they can be filtered out...
It’s always worth filtering the selection, so that it ONLY

moves the stuff relevant to the timeline positions.
Usually the less the MC has control of, the better, but
not always. If and when you need to make adjustments
to the MC, the filtered attribute count can give you a hint
as to what changes have been registered when the
Wizard is used.
It’s also worth saving your grid once you’re done so that
you can easily call up everything again for future use
either with this character, or other characters.
It will save the grid shape AND the frame numbers

which can be a massive timesaver- particularly if you
keep the frame numbers the same each time you make
an MC head grid in the future.
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Now type the name of the MC you want created. In this
case it’s Mr Balloon Head.
It’s a good idea to call each MC after the character,

rather than just HEAD, or BODY because when you
have more than one character in a scene at the same
time, their MC Script names may conflict with each other
if they are the same and weird things may happen.
Press Create.
An MC has to be attached to a Composite in order to

work. I advise you to attach it to the first Composite
INSIDE the Mr Balloon Head Group.
Technically you can attach it anywhere, but the

advantage of attaching it inside the Mr Balloon Head
character is that you can easily put the whole character
into the Library for later use.
Also, don’t put it too far into the node structure if there
are multiple groups in your puppet as there is an
advantage to this which I will explain later in the guide.
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Save the MC’s Javascript itself. It should automatically
go in the Harmony file’s “scripts” folder. If not, make
sure it does.
Add a peg to the MC. This will allow you to move the
whole MC joystick area to where you want it to be.
Go to frame one, then move it using the Advanced

Animation Translate Tool
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Now go to your ‘Creche’ area (wherever you have
decided to place it)…
… and using the Translation tool, muck about with

your new MC!
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Trust in meeee
I’ve got to be honest with you. Writing this down is tough. I think of
all the tutorials I’m having to write down, instead of just show-
Master Controllers are the most tricky. There are so many fiddling
little concepts to grasp, that it doesn’t matter how eloquent I am,
some of what I say will inevitably get forgotten or get
misinterpreted.
The only advice I can give with this entire chapter is to:
Take Breaks
Try several times and make improvements as you go.
Take Breaks
Set small attainable goals that are easy to learn from stage by
stage.
Take Breaks.
I can do MCs pretty easily now. But when I was learning them,
there were several times I wanted to eat my own Wacom pen.
It’s normal.
Master Control
VS
Manual Control
Body
Head Lip-sync Blink Expression Other
rotation
Control Control Control Control Control
Control
Manual
control
It’s important to remember the role in the animator in all of this. After all, for some movements, they need to be able to move things around
themselves without the Master Controller butting in and forcing things around to pre defined movements all the time. As such, it is vital that
when you plan your character, you also think of the Manual movements as a kind of master controller of its own.
If you don’t... PING!
What is ‘PING!’? You ask?...
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This represents a fairly standard part of a rig
structure.
I’ve put a ‘Rendered Display’ in to illustrate what will

show up on the Camera View.
Now if I move the Pegs in the Master Controller Setup

Timeline, the MC will commandeer these for its own
when you animate- resulting in ‘PING!’.
What we need is...another layer of movement to do

the job of moving the stuff around at the MC setup
stage, freeing up these pegs for Manual movement by
the animator later on...
Ah! Now by putting another layer of pegs into the mix, we can
Position, Rotate, Scale & Skew our drawings around in a kind of
duel setup use.
One for the Master Controller to use, and one for the animator!
It’s important to add the Suffix- MC to each relevant peg as it

means it becomes a lot easier to select the controlled parts of the
puppet later on, ready for the MC Wizard to cast it’s spell.
I even highlight the Pegs in RED and create a Selection Preset

showing me only the Master Controlled elements in the timeline
more easily later.
Problem solved you may feel.
And you’d be right!
Largely...
However, when we come to actually creating our MC setup, the only

way to move these new MC Pegs is to manually select them in the
node view or timeline, which might be quite a faff to do, particularly if
the rig is large & complicated.
So here is a suggestion. It’s not mandatory, it’s not essential, but it can
make the process of building a ‘PING!’ free MC timeline much easier.
You create a series of VPEG icons which, when
selected- AUTOMATICALLY move the correct
MC pegs when you’re planning your MC.
The “Transformation Limit” Nodes force the VPEGS to be unaffected by movement, so only the graphics of the actual character move around.
Transformation Limit properties ASSIST VPEG Properties
For this, make sure ‘Don’t Use Embedded Pivot’ is switched on, otherwise
the VPEG’s own pivot will influence the movement in the MC Setup.
Make sure all the values are set to zero apart Since the Assist machine will be discarded after the rigging is completed,
from ‘Active’ which should be at 100. you don’t want these things leaving any kind of trace behind.
Assist Display Rendered Display
Movement here... ... affects movement here!
The two displays are there so that you can have one Camera view for the actual Puppet, and the other Camera view for the VPEG buttons.
This way, the VPEGs won’t get in the way of your puppet as there may end up being quite a lot of them.
It’s a very visual solution, and makes accessing your puppet much more fun while you’re getting the puppet into all the necessary
positions for your MC.
Since I make quite a lot of Master Controllers,
I decided to invest the time in making an
assist machine which took an afternoon to
build, but once done will never have to be
done again!
You just pop this clean version into the

Library, then you can drag a fresh one into
your rig and couple up all the MC pegs to
taste when you are ready!
The Transformation Limit is there, I just

grouped each one as shown above. That way,
the linking cable goes straight through the
middle and it makes it a lot easier to see the
connections.
This 'tribal mask’ is the full Assist Graphic which
would be off in it’s own Camera window beside the
character’s Camera window while I’m able to
select and manipulate the Master Control pegs in
a relaxed fashion without accidentally affecting the
pegs I want freed up for the animators to use.
It’s a PING! free existence!
The No Deformations Head
Deformations are a precious commodity when animating.
As such, you may want to often try and avoid squandering their magic over more mundane things such as master
controlled head turns.
I want to show that you DON’T have to use deformations for everything.
If you’re creative, you may be able to use a mixture of shapes, and the occasional cutter to achieve very similar,
sometimes even better results.
Head Construction
This chap’s head construction is fairly basic.
His Head is made from a shape union of two pieces- a Circle

and a ‘jaw’ shape.
The Hair is made from several angular ‘lozenges’ which are

squished and moved around to create his full hairstyle.
Yes this is stylised, but it doesn’t have to be.
You could create more subtle shape unions allowing for

more more unusual shapes to be created for every position.
You could also ‘split’ it down the centre so one side can be
distorted at a different rate than the other side.
Experiment!
Just bear in mind that the more you split a shape up into
component parts, the more manipulatable the overall shape
will become.
So long as you don’t rely to heavily on cutters to achieve

what you want, it should even be more CPU friendly than the
Deformation heavy alternative!
TIP!
Master controller tips!
There is no right or wrong way to make an MC of course.
Depending on what you want from the magical feature, how you pursue it
is entirely up to you.
Here are some suggestions and tips to help you out so you can make the
right choices for your projects.
Dual Master Controllers
Option A HEAD
Lip
Sync
Mouth, deformed into all the head MC

positions using a Free From deformer. A B C D E F G A B C D E F G
Mouth A B C D F Mouth E G
Then Lip-sync with Drawing Subs
Option B
Mouth, moved into head relative
Lip
positions using Position, Rotate, Scale HEAD
Sync
& Skew.
Then for Lip-sync, use Drawing Subs.
Mouth A B C D Mouth E G
Possibly several sets to accommodate
front and profile positions.
Option C
Mouth, moved into relative positions Lip
HEAD
using Position, Rotate, Scale & Skew. Sync
Then, by using a separate Lip-sync

MC, Deform it, using an Envelope Mouth A B C D Mouth F G
Deformer.
For extreme positions like MID 3, a

Drawing sub could also be used
Don’t use Cutters. Use Z!
It’s tempting to think that when you Take this eye for example. By the time However a much better solution would
want to not show something, you it gets to the MID 4 position, you might be to just ‘hide’ the eye by moving it
should ‘cut’ it. think that the only way for it to back in the Z axis by pressing Alt-Up.
disappear will be to cut it.
Perhaps using the head shape as the

cutter.
Time movement in the Z axis
You might sometimes have this issue.
The B_Eye appears fine in the extreme positions, but then slides behind the head so quickly, that part of the animation creates a ‘cyclops’!
The issue is that the Eye travels through Z space far too quickly, and since no keyframes can be created for the in-between frames, the eye
seems to have to way to be controlled between the two extremes, right?
If you imagine all the layers as flat planes in 3
Let’s simplify things and show just three dimensional space, you can figure out a
elements at play- The Nose, the Eye and solution to this problem more easily.
the Head. Now lets take look at these face parts from the
side view…
Example 1
The Eye has minimal travel in
Z, so it’s able to do this quickly
over one frame
Example 2
This Eye however has a bigger
distance to travel in Z, so it has
to do this over several frames
So what you have to do is move the B_Eye TOWARDS the camera in the MID 4 position.
This widens the gulf between positions in the Z axis, and makes the distance it has to travel longer, effectively slowing the movement down
and allowing the eye to stay on top of the head RIGHT until the last moment.
Of course, since the nose always rests on the top of the eye, this also needs to be shifted forwards in position MID 4, so that it stays onto of
the B_Eye as before.
The completed 180º grid
How to animate with a Master Controller
Since any Master Controller only creates keys, it’s worth

clarifying this by showing you how to actually animate when
using one.
The Master Controller’s positions are deliberately suggested to

give the illusion of face elements circumnavigating the head.
In reality of course, they do no such thing
A B
So if you were to animate Position A to Position B, you can’t just put the puppet in those 2 positions
on the timeline and expect it to “just work”.
Remember all a MC does is create keys, not anything more sophisticated than that.
You have to use your talent to manipulate the puppet into the correct in-between positions.
It will be down to you to give the timeline the assistance it needs to make the animation look good.
A B C
A B
Also, the flip that occurs in the timeline whenever you animate from left to right has to be addressed, manually.
If your movement crosses from a flipped to a non flipped position, or vice versa, you must place a key directly next
to each other to counteract the strange artefacts a motion keyframed flip would create.
A D
B C
The Deformed Head
So we’ve now come to this.
This is the method that you probably had in mind before you even started this chapter.
It is most glam, and seemingly the most obvious.
It is also the most tricky, mostly due to ‘deformation drift’ which Jollop will explain later.
Bus Stop is a really good example of a deformed head, because he is a character who
couldn’t easily be created using anything other than a combination of Translations and
Deformations.
So without further ado...
Create a Master Plan
Before you make any rig, it’s important to plan it first.
Get away from the computer. Now.
I’m serious.
Get something called a piece of paper and a pencil (Or an iPad if you absolutely must
be near technology), and draw out all the possible scenarios you can see this
character in.
Now it’s important to figure out which rig abilities are essential, and which are... nice
but not important, and which would possibly impact on the animator if they
were there.
Remember, it doesn’t matter how much of a Nostradamus you might think

yourself, the animator WILL ALWAYS break the rig and WILL ALWAYS need it
to do something you haven’t foreseen. The main thing is
that they will need the freedom to manoeuvre if they
animate themselves into a corner.
Here is a MC rig for Bus Stop. I chose Bus Stop for this rig
because his head is the most complicated part and shows
pretty much all the issues you may run into for your own facial
rigs and by extension, body rigs.
Incidentally, his own body is so simple, that A- I didn’t think a

master controller for that was particularly necessary, and B- I
think I’m able to adjust it quite adequately using the native
toolset anyway. If you’re interested, it’s made from a simple
‘tube’ with drawing substitution red and blue stripes which
‘bend’ to give the impression that the cylinder is rolling
towards and away from the camera.
Just one point.
I- like a crazy person, decided to create this character EXACTLY as I had designed him- with a
blue automated shadow along the side of his body. If it was a normal shadow, the technique is
effortless-
The principle for this blue shadow is fairly straightforward, but then little by little becomes a
multiplicity of various components too niche and wearisome to list which is why I left out this
aspect of the tutorial to stop people’s brains from leaking out into their shoes.
Just make sure you’re not operating any heavy machinery while you look at it, as it might make
you faint.
Let’s get the Body out of the way
Before we get into this, I’ll just go over how I made Bus Stop’s
body.
His snake-like torso is a simple tube design, distorted by an

envelope deformer make into a simple top-middle-bottom curve.
Since he is virtually a snake, I did something with the node view

which is a little unconventional, but allows his body to ‘slide’ up
and down the deformation shape, without having to manually
position it into the sort of ‘snake-slither’ that a character like him
would often move into.
All you have to do is move the peg UNDERNEATH the deformer in

the node view. Then you are essentially moving the drawing when
grabbing the torso and not the deformation, creating this really
nice slide effect- and making his movement SO much easier!
Nudge body Nudge body

down up
IK Body
One more fancy thing I did was to use the Constrainer version
of IK as shown in Chapter 2.
At the time of writing, I’m not entirely sure if I like it for

BusStop to be quite honest, but that’s how I’ve done it for now.
I’m thinking that perhaps connecting the deformers to the head

using a Function Stitch would be better, but hey ho.
Anyway, that’s how I’ve done it.
And so to head...
The first thing you must do before you create any master controlled body
part is to draw it rough in every major position it should be in.
This not only helps you while you are posing your character, but it also may
give you insights into how your character should be broken up to achieve
optimal positions.
For MC’s created by the Stack Wizard (which I will get onto later), you will create several grids (not just one) in order to achieve the effect.
So in anticipation, I sketched each grid out including most of the mouth positions first.
Yes, in this instance it is overkill- you won’t need to go THIS far, but it helps if you have it, none the less.
Drawing your plan of action- even if it’s just the MID poses
will really help you predict how you make the character to
get everything you need from it.
Here’s an example for you to illustrate what I mean.
Bus Stop’s Jaw is quite a substantial piece of flesh.
It changes the most when rotating into each position.
It also needs to change dynamically when used for Stack

Wizard Lip Sync.
Here are two ways of potentially solving this problem.
Solution A
Distort the entire Jaw as one part
Advantages Dis-Advantages
This has the advantage of being able to be manipulated fairly The downside is that the jaw may not be able to distort
easily, since it is just one piece. from 4 to 3 easily, as the jaw radically changes shape to
become the MID 3 position. Bus Stop is a highly stylised
If you used Free Form deformer, you’d gain the ability to use
character- you can’t really recreate him in real life as his
drawing substitutions during lip sync if you wanted to go
jaw technically makes no sense in reality- He nose goes
down that route to get the mouth opening and closing, rather
in front of his mouth in certain poses, and then in profile-
than just using Envelope Deformations.
it doesn’t!
Solution B
Split the jaw into several parts
Advantages Dis-Advantages
This allows for the jaw to be distorted in a more extreme way However- yes the disadvantage is that if animators DO
than if it was created with just one part, and actually makes need to get his mouth into some crazy position, it will be
deforming for the MC for some positions much easier. slightly harder for them to achieve since the simplicity of
animating just one body part is no longer an option.
Since the animators will rarely be controlling the mouth
manually anyway, you should be able to get away with this
without too much worrying about how animators will need to
control it later.
So build your face.
Try to keep deformations in your MC to a minimum- they are precious and

are always better used by the animator if possible.
Also, they are CPU heavy, so minimising their use is always

favourite if you can.
Cutters can be used, but the same rule applies.
Try to keep it lean!
I designed Bus Stop with a mouth that is actually split down

the middle so that essentially one part is completely
squashed into oblivion when the profile pose is achieved.
If I hadn’t done that, it would have been very difficult to
morph the mouth and jaw into the profile from the front
position correctly and made the lines less crisp and wobbly.
The Rainbow’s Order
There is a reason why I’ve arranged the movement rainbow in the order it’s in.
It helps you be disciplined when creating your MC, particularly with regard to
deformation drift.
If you follow the list in order when positioning your elements, it reduces the possibility
of Transformations, Constrainers, Deformations & Drawing Subs working against each
other.
After all, they all have their pivots, and the more points of change you stack up, the
more complicated and unpredictable the tweened results will be.
A nightmare of elements literally pulling in opposite directions.
Imagine adjusting this circle…
POSITIONED to the left
SCALED out
DEFORMED to previous size

then moved to the right
And a DRAWING SUB, pulling it

upwards!
You’ve ultimately ended up with
the circle moving upwards a
little and that’s it!
Something that the POSITION
could have done on its own!
And as a consequence, the MC tweening is MUCH more

predictable and easier to manage than having to fight against
6 other irrelevant movement methods!
Warning!
deformations drift dangers

Remember all the fun you had with pulling that blue ball around in the Slider Wizard
tutorial? Great. Don’t do that again!
It’s tempting to start pulling things around and- dare I say- enjoy yourself when pulling
things into all the different head positions for the Grid & Stack Wizards.
The most important thing to bear in mind- particularly when dealing with Deformations
is -Drift, particularly with regard to facial features or body parts like arms and torsos.
At some point, your animators will need to actually move the puppet around, and all the
pivot points you put in for one position, will have to predictably work with all the other
positions as well. It is always tempting to start pulling the deformations around without
giving thought to the ‘origin’ from which the shapes did spring in the first place.
It is therefore a good idea to always move each body part in a set order when creating
your positions, so you don’t forget to remember this.
The Movement Rainbow is a way of remembering the order to move the puppet.
Follow the order- Position, then Constrain and Deform & Drawing Sub.
Doing things this way will minimise unwanted pivot drifts.

Warning!
Keep track of your deformation points
There is a reason why I’ve said to copy and paste the MID positions into the UP & DOWN
positions before you start moving things around. It means that the deformation points start
from a common place, minimising the risk of points doing unwanted dances between
poses.
Look at these examples. Poses A & B appear the same.
Well the beginning & end shapes may look the same, but the
points move around differently, creating a different in-between
A B
pose.
Sometimes you may want both Examples.
The point is- you don’t want them happening accidentally! A B

And it’s easily done.
Some transitions are
allowed to be Ugly.
Have you ever paused a Disney film and seen a famously remembered character KNOWN for
being attractive suddenly appear bizarre and malformed? Yet when you play the footage back,
you just don’t see it? Master Controllers will occasionally have this issue. I’ve found that
particularly between positions 4 & 3, things can often go a little crazy. And that’s ok! So long
as there are some transition frames going from one position to another and the animator
gets from pose to pose quickly enough, you’ll never notice!
Occasionally there will be times when this cheat cannot be used, and perhaps a slower head
movement is vital for a shot. Under these circumstances, let the animators worry about the
odd frame.
I think its very important that- so long as this is not happening often- Riggers do not get
themselves too caught up in making EVERY possible frame look gorgeous.
What we need from this procedure is a clean, fast, easy to use rig, not something so full of
cutters and other garbage that it grinds the CPU into dust.
If the occasional position suffers for the greater good- tough!

All done. upgrade to stack wizard?
Right. You’ve got your head positions organised a-la grid wizard methods.
Now you could finish it there. If you just want to use deformations on the head whatever character you are creating and the mouth is just controlled
using a series of Drawing Subs, or a set of deformations JUST for a LipSync MC of it’s own, then your work here is done.
If however you want to create an MC using a Stack Wizard instead, it’s worth creating a Grid Wizard MC at this point to test your head rotations and
make sure they are as sound as a dollar pound before you start mucking about with Stack Wizard MC controlled LipSync positions.
Correcting any issues with mouth positions once the head is being Stack Wizard MC rigged will be extremely fiddly as you are essentially repeating
the head grids over and over again using copy and paste.
Stack
wizard
Hard
So… It’s come to this. You are now fully flexed and want to show off the very best
most advanced spells that a wizard can produce.
The Stack Wizard is new to Harmony 17. It is essentially a fusion of both the
Slider and Grid Wizard, allowing you the ability to slide between multiple
grids.
This wizard is perfect for advanced lip-sync effects while animating with a head
grid MC since both a deformation of Mouth position AND a deformation of mouth
Lip-sync can be blended together.
I thought Bus-Stop would be a perfect showcase for this technique as his mouth (unlike
the other cats) has a very three-dimensional structure which can’t easily be replicated in
multiple positions just using drawing substitutions.
Let’s get started!
Meowth order
MMM AAY AAH OOH MMM EEE THH
MMM-AAY-AAH-OOH-MMM-EEE-THH
No, I haven’t trapped my fingers in the car door.
These mouth shapes in this exact order should give you an optimum range of mouth poses achievable.
The MMM position makes an appearance twice because we are using a 2D slider allowing transitions from MMM to AAY, as well as
OOH & EEE.
AAY EEE
AAH OOH
The stack wizard window
Recognise this?
It’s virtually the same as the Grid

Wizard isn’t it? Well apart from the
slider on the right which select the
different grids… yes it is.
I won’t waste your time explaining it

all again.
Just increase or decrease your Grid

count by altering the number in the
top right corner.
Use the slider to select the grid you

want to program.
How to animate using the Stack Wizard
If you animate like me- straight ahead, you have no problems when
animating lip-sync with a stack wizard MC, since you are posing the
character pretty much entirely for each frame in sequence.
However, I realise I’m in the minority and if you (like most people)
animate in the more conventional way of keys, breakdowns and cg
enhanced in-betweens, then remember that animating lip sync with an
MC created by a Stack Wizard is a little different than normal.
Usually when people animate, they do the first pass of animation with no
lip sync at all, and only when the movement is just right and approved,
lip-sync is then ‘added’ at the final stage.
Since the Bus Stop’s mouth is fully animated as both a head position AND
lip-synced position, the mouth needs to be adjusted in a slightly odd way
AFTER the animation of the head has been achieved.
For this technique to work, I strongly advise the use of Selection Presets
to make things easier.
So what do you actually do? Over to you. Bon Bon…
How to animate Lip-sync with a
Stack wizard MC
Create a Selection Preset of all the component

parts controlling the mouth.
This is best done at the rigging stage so

animators can always select this quickly, and
they won’t accidentally select irrelevant areas of
the puppet.
Use the preset to highlight only the layers which

are directly controlling the mouth, by selecting
“Selection Only Mode” on the timeline.
Select all the keyframes in the entire ‘mouth

related’ timeline and delete them.
Only delete the keyframes of course. Not the

drawing substitutions.
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Now go back to the first frame and slide the MC
slider to the desired lip sync position.
Frame 1
Go through the animation and alter the slider.

The mouth will start misaligned sometimes, but
using the slider will make the mouth PING! back
into its rightful place.
Slide
Sometimes, when the head is moving, but the

lip-sync stays the same as the previous frames,
you’ll want the mouth to match the head’s
movement.
In order to correct this as efficiently as possible,

select the slider and press up then down on the
arrow keys which will ‘poke' the puppet and
update the problem mouth.
Nudge up and down
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Body Master Controllers
So now you’ve covered the principles of how each MC

Wizard gets it’s information, I think it’s worth looking a
slightly different application for them now- Bodies.
As I said before, you can make MCs do whatever you

want them to do, but with regards to bodies, usually
you just want them to turn body parts around easily.
When set up well, MCs can allow you to easily pose

and animate the body for scene placement and various
areas of subtle posing for walks and turns.
In this tute, I’ll show you how to use a Slider MC for a

torso turnaround, which will give you the idea of how to
tackle this kind of rigging for all other body parts.
Keep each body parts’ MC
Warning!
independent
It’s worth creating every part of a body’s MC in isolation
rather than the whole thing for maximum flexibility when
animating.
In other words- One MC for the Upper Torso. One for the
Lower Torso. One for Foot A, One for Foot B etc. That sort
of thing.
You want each MC to act independently from one another

to ensure maximum control when animating. You don’t
want an arm or leg moving around unexpectedly while
animating a run or backflip!
I realise this will lead to some pretty goofy looking poses

when you create your puppet, but- trust me- this is what
you want at this stage.
Yes your character’s lower torso has legs that turn around
yet the feet ARE UNTOUCHED.
Let another MC be created JUST FOR EACH FOOT, and

then the animator can swivel the foot around to taste,
without having to fight against a pretty, yet useless
turnaround animation. You’re creating a puppet. Not a
piece of animation. Not yet.
Body Slider Timeline
Normal Poses Flipped Poses Testing Crèche
How to avoid ugly
deformations
You may find when creating your poses (for any kind of
MC actually) that the shape you start with does not play
nice with some of the shapes you have to contort them
into- particularly if you are having to squash, rather
than stretch the deformer.
In instances like this, as I touched upon in Chapter 2, it

is worth changing the drawing itself, as well as the
deformer to create a more compatible shape which
can then be bent into all the positions required.
Redrawn Image as ‘Egg shape’ Deformed into correct 1st pose Deformed into improved MID 3
Warning!
To Avoid The Body’s Dreaded ‘PING!’

As mentioned previously, MC Pegs are extremely useful, but for Body MCs, I
would say that this time they are ESSENTIAL!
They will allow the MCs to position the arms and legs relative to the body,
while allowing the animator to move the arms around PING! free. This is
extremely important when animating a walk or run, and you need the
‘swagger’ of the torso with a maintained arm position.
Rigger VS Animator
It’s important to test your puppet in all positions to make sure the
puppet is still actually animatable!
Cutters and Deformations can easily lull you into a false sense of
security until you try to move the puppet as you would when
animating and you realise you’ve rigged yourself into a corner.
For example, maybe the torso is cutting the arm in some clever
way.
Well it may work for a turnaround. But what about when the
character has to do a cartwheel? Will his arms and torso allow it?
There are times when Deformation drift is unavoidable with

regards to Body MCs. In which case, you either have to put up with
it, or come up with some other useful invention to try to counteract
the worst of it.
The thing is, just regularly test your character mid pose. Ask the
question:
If I were an animator RIGHT NOW,

what would I want to be able to do?
The pivot is in still in the correct place, but in this

position, it bends ugly.
I put an extra lower Torso Peg in here so animators It is possible to use a Transformation Gate to change
could easily adjust the lower torso by scaling and the pivot of a Deformed shape in a Master Controlled
skewing if and when the alien bends over. movement since the gate is keyframable like the
As Animating a deform takes longer movement itself.
You just assign a peg to a particular pose and off you
go.
How to flip correctly
For Flipping the actual movement, rather than just the actual poses, you’ll want to copy the red ‘Normal’ frames and
‘Paste Reverse’ them into the Yellow ‘Flipped’ frames this time.
That way, the animation will mirror and give you the rest of the moment in the correct order. All you’ll need to do then is
Flip and Anti Flip...
Anti Flip?!
Aniseed...
TIP!
Flipper & Anti Flipper
You’ve already encountered the Flipper Peg before.
This is super useful to flip the whole torso around so there are fewer
poses to make.
However, what if you want to ‘neutralise’ the effect for elements like
the Arms?
You don’t want to flip them.
Imagine a character holding a flag, turning around, only to have the

flag ‘magically’ fly into the other arm! T’would never do.
To neutralise a Flipper Peg, all you have to do is COPY and PASTE

(Don’t Duplicate) it to another part of the rig. That will create a
cloned peg. And a flip of a flip and we’re back to normal!
Colour me confused
When working with Body Turnarounds, I can’t tell you how
many times my brain has got all twisted up trying to figure out
which arm is which. Is this arm supposed to be in the front
now? Or at the back? Ugh!
Well here’s a little tip. Just use a Colour-Override to

temporarily change the colour from what it is now to something
obviously different! It’ll save your sanity, believe me!
Full Turnaround
Some of the poses will look plain goofy AND THATS WHAT WE WANT!
This is not a piece of animation.
You have programmed a tool for animators to get the body parts into to
right places and the less involvement the MC has the better.
Like a well trained butler, it should do its job without making its
presence known.
So apart from moving the entire arm from place to place so that it
appears to be joined at the shoulder- LEAVE IT AND THE HAND ALONE!
Separate Display for a Master Controller
The great thing about MCs since Harmony 16 is that you can
have a separate display for Master Controllers.
When I was working on “The Macra Terror” we had to create

a very elaborate ‘console’ onto which all the master
controllers were placed which would hover over near the
character’s faces.
This was great when there was just one character on

screen, but when there were several of them, it was an
absolute nightmare. The other problem was that the
console would create a keyframe every time you moved the
wretched thing around because it was part of the
character’s group.
If you wanted to play the animation back, the console would

have a tendency to dance around the screen like an
unwanted guest at a wedding until you deleted all of the
console’s keyframes.
Now several things have changed meaning the master controller can be placed into a separate display for
each character, meaning you can hide, select and move things around without the action being inhibited by all
these sliders and dots.
Now you can set up the MC so that the dot slides around your character’s head if you like, and indeed, that’s
what Toon Boom have in their promotional material.
But I personally find this distracting, and it’s particularly annoying since the MC controller doesn’t disappear
when you play back the animation, or even preview it in a render, so I prefer the method I’m about to
describe.
Start by going to preferences and allowing
Advanced Displays in the ‘Advanced’ tab.
This will allow the app to show more than
one display node’s contents at any time.
I recommend your character have a display node of it’s own at the

very root composite.
This allows you to preview a scene with JUST that character visible.
This can be handy in crowd scenes or when the computer is

throwing a hissy fit over processing power.
We’re going to add another display node to the master controller node.
What we need is-
The ability to have the MC controls in their own window
To not also be shown in the window with the characters
To show the MC controls’ keyframes visible on the timeline
It took a while, but after much experimentation, I figured out a way to get
all three things.
This is what you should do:

This doesn’t quite get the results you need.
How to create a
separate MC window
Before you create a Master Controller using a

Wizard, create a new composite in the character’s
base group and have it free float, unconnected to
the main composite.
The reason for this is you do not ever want to see

the MC in the main display, and when you create an
MC using a wizard it MUST connect to a
COMPOSITE of some kind.
If you connect it to the character’s main comp, It

won’t render, but it will get in the ruddy way when
animating and will be a nuisance.
Add a display to this composite and if you fancy, a

Colour Card. I personally make the card the same
colour as the toolbars around it so it kind of ‘blends
in’ with the rest of Harmony and looks less
distracting, but you can do whatever you like.
You can even put in a guide picture of the character

you want to be really fancy.
Just make sure you lock it first, otherwise you’ll be

dragging the image or Colour card around instead
of the MC sliders!
Pageof 339
352 of 352
Create the Master Controller and when prompted,
have it attached to the newly created Master
Controller Composite.
Rearrange the nodes on the composite to taste, so

long as the MC is connected directly to it.
Add a peg to the MC and position the slider on the

screen using the Advanced Animation tools.
Pageof 340
352 of 352
If you wish you can customise the font, colour,
on-screen label and size of the slider using the
properties of the Master Controller node.
Pageof 341
352 of 352
THIS IS IMPORTANT. Connect the MC to the Multi Port
Out of the group.
From there you don’t have connect it to anything at all,

but it is vital that the Master Controller’s composite
output makes some kind of connection with outside the
group.
This is the reason: The MC (Since Version 16) creates

keyframes which don’t do anything except mark exactly
where the sliders are to be displayed on the screen.
This means that they kind of ‘sync’ with the relevant

positions of the character and when you close the file
and re-open it again, the Master controller sliders are in
the right places if you decide to tinker with the
animation later.
Previously, when the MC was turned off, then turned on

again, the sliders would PING! to their starting
positions, making animating with them quite tricky if you MC Not connected to Multi-Out
were to leave your work and come back.
If you don’t attach the MC to the out of the group, the

slider’s keyframes will still be created, but they won’t be
displayed on the timeline and if you decide to delete or
move the character’s keys, the MC’s keys won’t be MC connected to Multi-Out
altered, meaning some very confused faces from
animators as their scene is static and the MC sliders’
old positions start dancing all over the screen like
something from The Exorcist.
Pageof 342
352 of 352
To The Secret Lab!
So you’ve mastered all the different Master Controllers?
Time to mix things up a bit!
I’ve been experimenting with Master Controllers for uses other than just
the obvious ‘Turning-things-around’ uses.
One of things I am most excited about is using them to get the ability to
easily manipulate cloth on your characters to stop them looking so stiff
and cardboard-like.
I’ve also been exploring the possibilities of using them for Muscles and
hair and even hand poses.
Also the mysteries of Expressions… I muck about with those every so

often and would like to put my findings to paper.
Ooh! And quick time saving inventions like graphical Switches,

templates and node machines. Haven’t mentioned them at all!
Essentially, you want to manipulate your characters as nicely and as

quickly as possible.
Well... That’s for a future Chapter 4....
H E
F T
S O
D
TS R IE N
F
CA er
Too
n Boo
m
Gu rus
Oth
The cat’s meow
As I’ve continued to say all the way through this Guide- don’t just listen to me.
Yes I have some answers, but none of them are gospel. In fact, I may even be wrong in certain
places. Over time, one learns new techniques and adapts and changes one’s philosophies.
Heck- even while writing this book, I’ve actually changed my mind, or cleaned things up and
actually rethought some of the ways that I pursue things.
On that note, I think it’s always a good idea to look to others for another perspective.
Maybe they’ve encountered some other kind of problem, and figured out a different way of
solving it.
Or maybe they’ve written a script or working method and want to share the love with the rest
of the world.
Or maybe they are plain insane and have come up with the most ingenious ways to solve
problems and create things you didn’t even realise were possible.
I reached out to several people who I think worth checking out for the reasons above, and
they’ve agreed to be included in this mini-chapter.
I recommend you pay them a visit, as each one of them has in some way, helped me, and I bet
that they could help you too!
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This guide is not and probably never will be- finished.

This guide is a tapestry of discoveries, inventions and inspirations

Please enjoy discovering them with us!

Pegs?! Composites?! All these fancy buttons and dials?!

Why oh why can’t Harmony just let me get on with it?!

Harmony may be more complex on the face of it, but learning

Which is of course, what I’m here for ;-)

Initially, you will have to un-learn habits which you

My advice at the beginning is keep your early

1. DON’T USE SYMBOLS

2. YOU CAN EASILY MOVE THINGS IN Z.

Drawing in Harmony has more flexibility than Animate, and

I would suggest mucking about with small shapes and

Why haven’t they automated this process?

Why don’t they have a standard rigging system for bipeds?

Why is it so darn complicated to just do a simple little thing?!

Have Faith. It’ll be alright in the end.

How to draw body parts

If you’re coming directly from Flash, it may be tempting

Harmony’s brush tool is fairly similar to Flash’s so no-

Harmony’s pencil tool feels quite different and I would

I find I default to using the Brush tool for rough

The pencil tool in Harmony allows for a line which

Messy drawings can be painful to rig

Ready made lozenges

Creating line bends

2. Draw the shape, making sure it forms a complete loop or

5 6 the line to start fading.

5. Then click the place you want the line to disappear.

7. To be really thorough, grab the handles and while holding Shift,

Look at this simple character:

He is clearly comprised of 3 different generic shapes- A triangle, a square and a circle.

The general principle is this:

I’m going to show you 2 methods

I’ve shown you two methods because

The auto patch method is shown in blue

The non auto patch method is shown in

For use with an auto-patch 1

2. Assuming you’ve created the artwork in the

4. Select the colour art sub-layer and ‘Paste' the

5. Reselect the line art sub-layer (You don’t have

6. Repeat this for each Shape you wish to

Notice the sub-layer buttons.

In step 5 the ‘eye’ icon is shown as ‘on’.

That means all the sub-layers are shown

2. Grab an auto-patch from the node library

3. Couple things together as shown, and the

2. Assuming you’ve created the artwork in the line art

2 3 layer, select the line art sub-layer

3. If there are any fills, delete them.

4. ‘Copy’ line art

6. Convert the line art into strokes by clicking the ‘Pencil

8. Delete the converted line art in the Colour Art layer so

9. Reselect the line art sub-layer (You don’t have to do

10. Repeat this for every shape you wish to unionise

2. Grab 2 line art nodes and 2 colour art nodes

3. Couple things together so that you manually

If you move individual shapes around in Z axis using [Alt

First right click the Library and make it ‘Right to Modify’

The exception to this might be a rigging palette or some kind of

updates across the whole animation!

Character Name Prefix