For my Major Project I started off upskilling myself with rigging in Toon Boom. I’d done rigging in the past with After Effects so I had a general grasp of rigging in 2D. Sarah recommended, to speed up the process, I take a previously designed character and rig them. Since I’d just finished my pitch bible I decided to use my main character Jill and rig her.

I’d started a new role at the Univeristy, which was going to eat up a lot my attention. So to save myself more time and since I was only concerned with learning the process behind rigging in Harmony, rather than producing a world class rig, I aimed to create a 90 degree rig for Jill, not a whole 360.

I started by looking at Harmony’s own resources for rigging:

Adding Constraints to a Rig | Toon Boom Learn

Rigging 1 with Harmony Premium | Toon Boom Learn

Rigging 2 with Harmony Premium | Toon Boom Learn

Rigging 3 with Harmony Premium | Toon Boom Learn

How to Rig a Cut-out Character

Although the websites were a bit of mess and were missing some vital video tutorials, so I had to cromb through their youtube to find them.

Using the Harmony tutorials the first step was creating the layers for a blank rig.

I didn’t find this terribly useful, since it was more ground work than actually getting stuck into the nitty gritty and I already understood rig heriarchy from After effects. Eventually I moved onto creating the assets for the rig, which you do from scratch in Harmony itself rather than importing the drawings from another software. Again, the original tutorials from Harmony here were not the best. They explained the process but half way through I discovered they were showing me a method that was more time consuming rather than productive. Leading me through one side of the process, then returning to do the other half instead of doing them simultaneously. Eventually I pivoted to using a combination of the Harmony tutorials and live streams from other riggers showing me their process, Kyu-Bum Lee was especially helpful in this regard.

Along the way I gathered a variety of shorcuts, advice and off-hand reminders for myself which I could reference back to for future use.

I began working on building my rig in Harmony, which was a realtively straightforward process of tracing my designs.

The next step was going through my node libary and cleaning it up. taking it from this:

To this:

It wasn’t stricly nessecary to do this, this early but I found it easier to make sense of the mess of nodes this way. One of the biggest issues I encountered was the hair in my character. It was a nightmare. I was struggling with the design and how to deal with all the interlocking strands and getting them to intercut into eachother. I found this tutorial online which I felt was really helpful.

But once I had solved this issue I realised I had an even greater problem with how I was going to manage the hair when she was turning. Elements that were in the back were going to need to be the front and vice versa. It was also around this time that my new Univeristy post started eating up more of my time and I decided to make a decision.

Knowing I’d need to crunch my MA over the Christmas holiday I chose to pivot my major project from Toon Boom rigging to a series of walk cycles.

My reasoning behind this was four fold:

I was faster animating than rigging, I enjoyed animating more and since I was going to need to crunch I had a higher chance of finishing it if I enjoyed it, I had a solid enough foundation now for Harmony rigging and lastly, I knew I could produce stronger animations than rigs. So I choose to leave my rigging and move onto walk cycles.