From the course: Toon Boom Harmony Essential Training

Camera view and Drawing view - Harmony Tutorial

From the course: Toon Boom Harmony Essential Training

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Camera view and Drawing view

- [Narrator] Now we're going to look at the camera view, and the drawing view, and what's the big difference between them. So essentially, Toon Boom Harmony uses the metaphors that you would have taken from the original, classical, traditional period of animation when it was all done physically, on paper and sheets of cel. So think of your drawing view as a physical drawing on a physical sheet of paper. You're drawing on a layer that's opaque, not transparent. If you want to see through it, you have to put on a backlight beneath it. In the camera view, your drawing is magically transformed onto a transparent sheet of cel, so that you can see through it, and then you can move it around the screen. You can composite that on top of painted backgrounds, and other animation layers. So to move these around on levels, it would be as though we have all these layers of characters. We've drawn them, and in camera view they're transparent, and now we can use keyframes to tween them onto the screen, on the stage, where they can then interact, and move without us having to draw a million "in-betweens." So this is the power of the program. So I've made this very simple little scene of a monster creature coming in, and let me switch off, I've got onion skin on, that's... I've got something on there showing multiple frames- Okay, so now we have this little guy coming in, and doing a very simple action. What does he look like in drawing view? In drawing view, nothing happens. He is just locked down, because it's a drawing. All the animation was done in the camera view when I took the drawing into the camera view to add these keyframes. So if I hit F7 to delete these keyframes, no animation happens. That was all done using the animation tools... I'm going to move him around very quickly. ...and we have some sort of onion skinning on somewhere. I'll just ignore that for now. Okay. Oh, that's it right there, so that's yet another way of getting onion skinning... So, there we go. So that's how the animation is created in the camera view. So that's the primary difference between the camera view and the drawing view. So there could be instances where you want to see them both at the same time, and you don't want to be toggling back and forth. Let's rip one of these off... So I'll take the camera view and tear it off. Just float by itself so it doesn't dock somewhere else, so now we can see- If you have a second monitor, too, this is a really good way to do things. So, let me get that back. I have to drag from this text where it says "camera," and then when you see this light up, you can drop, and now we have the camera view, and the drawing view, side by side. So now if I click on the drawing view, and I make a change- So let's say I don't want to do something too fancy, let's say I delete the color. You can see it's disappeared there. Undo that... If I want to change the color to something different, let's see if we can get a color over here. I'm making a gray, paint it... So you see he's turned to gray on the right side of the screen. I'm going to undo all that. And if you want to go back to drawing on camera, simply drag over here, and you're back to normal. So it's a very, very powerful way to have control over your static image, your in-place object, and then the tween or keyframe object that's going to appear in the final animation. So we're back in camera view. There's one more thing I want to flag for you, and that's this item here, "Current Drawing on Top." Let's activate that, and now click on the asteroid, and notice how the asteroid is now on top, and now the planet is on top, and now space is on top. So whatever layer you're working on would then jump to the top. Should this happen to you by accident, it will drive you bonkers. It's a pretty cool tool if you need it for the quick editing of layers, but it's potentially dangerous and annoying if you accidentally push that button, so watch out for that. And of course you have the light table button too, if you want to see more clearly the different layers, so that'll just shade out the other layers apart from the one you're working on, which is very useful, but let's just push that off for now. So that's it, that's your brief introduction to the camera view, and the drawing view.

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