toon

Bezier Curve to Control Several Objects in Toon Boom Harmony

* Tested in TB Harmony 14 and 15.

This deformer can control the position of several objects without distorting their shapes, by using expressions.

One thing I noticed when using rig with expressions is that if you have rig A and rig B (which is a copy of A), if you copy and paste keyframes (from the pegs with expressions) in the timeline from rig A to rig B, sometimes TB will replace the expressions in rig B with the ones in rig A, and vice versa.

If this happens, you should have a copy of the original rig B, then copy the keyframes (from any frame) from the original rig into the rig that has the wrong expressions.

BezierCurveRig

 

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Selection Sets

selectionSet
With this tool you can save your selections. Run the script and a window will appear, write a name to identify the current selection and click ‘add’. Whenever you need this selection again just click it’s name in the ‘Sets’ list¹. The list below shows the selected nodes, and if you click them you’ll change the selection order.

I usually save things that are hard to select in the camera view so I don’t have to search for them in the network view, or when I often have to select several objects together I keep them saved in the list.

Selection Sets

¹ If you hold CTRL while clicking, the selection will be added to your current selection.

Expression Tutorial

My last script is used to recalculate the expressions values, so I thought it would be useful to show how to use expressions in your rig, and how to make a switch to turn it on and off.

Video quality was good before uploading to Youtube… but it’s still ok.

  • You don’t need to use the recalculate expression script. Read this: About Expressions.

Move Selected

If you use Flash, you know it has a very useful feature called ‘Edit Multiple Frames’. Then you find out Toon Boom Harmony 10.3 doesn’t have anything similar.  Why?? But this script tries to replicate that feature. It is not perfect, but it’s better than nothing.

First of all copy the ‘moveSelected.ui’ and ‘moveSelected.js’ to your scripts folder. Then copy all the png files to the default icons folder. If you’re working in Toon Boom connected to a database you’ll probably have to change the path for the ‘moveSelected.ui’ file that’s writen in the script, if you’re working offline you won’t have to bother with this. 

moveSelected_01

Here you have an object and its keyframes.  If you want to move only the middle frames, select them and run the script. A window will pop-up. You can type how much each click will move the object in x, y or z axis. You may write values ranging from 0.0001 to thousands, billions…

moveSelected_02

 There’s a couple of things you should be aware of before using this script. If you select a collapsed layer, it will select and move all the objects and its childs in the selected layers. And if you select a peg that is a child of another peg that has, for example,  45º rotation, when you click the move right arrow the object will move right but in a 45º path, if the parent peg has a 180º rotation, when you click right it’ll move left, and so on… 

Move Selected

Icons by Pablo Conde

Pablo Conde, from Argentina, sent me some great looking icons for some of the scripts! It’s visually identical to the standard icons in ToonBoom, so it will keep everything looking good. You may download all four here. 

He has a great demo reel also:

http://vimeo.com/condepablo

convertTo2s ConvertTo2s

toggleStopMotionKeyframe Toggle Stop Motion Keyframe

findCurrentFrame Find Current Frame

swapToZero Swap to Zero