How to use my Advanced Toon Boom Harmony puppet

[Music] [Music] hello there hope you're well uh welcome to this little tutorial for my patreon subscribers on how to use the empress puppet that i've been working on this year now just a quick proviso before we start um some of the techniques in this puppet are as of this recording um a little bit outdated since i've worked on her there are some techniques that i've actually improved upon since this puppet's come out the book which i'm hoping to get out start getting out by the end of the year we'll have updated techniques from the uh bits and pieces that are contained within the empress character so some of the things will be lighter easier to use than the creation of the character they i already tried to make her as light as possible but i've been able to figure out better ways since then so here we go now all you do to import a character is to make sure that the character is available through a library um if you don't know how to do that you have to consult a tomb manual but once you've got it in your library you just drag it into either the node view or the timeline and i'm just dragging it into the node view and i'll just make this a little bit more comfortable so this is i'll just do that as better isn't it this is her sort of sub group here and at the moment she has an erroneous composite here which you don't really need so you can delete that if you want but i put that in there to make sure that it's this part this node link that you plug into the scenes composite and when you do that there she is um the other one here this is her master peg which sticks out at the top and that gives you the first keyframe there just create another keyframe just for fun and this one what you do is you plug the camera's peg if you have a camera in your scene into this peg and then from there you can actually delete this um peg entirely if you want to it's up to you it's you do or you don't have to it's not really relevant but you do have to couple the cameras peg up to this the reason being is that if you select um in order to operate this character you need to go into your preferences and you need to go to advanced and make sure that advanced display is selected and that allows you to have more than one display visible so at the moment we've got the default display here and i've got another camera view over here and i'm going to select the empress mc for this window and that gives me the console here the reason i've coupled up the camera peg is because by doing so if i just move if i zoom the camera in and out on this view it zooms the camera in out of her but it makes sure that the console doesn't move if i uncouple that you'll see that both zoom in and out and we don't want that so that way we get the desired effect we want the camera to move and not the console okay now she's quite complicated to start with but then when you actually start to work with her she's incredibly user-friendly really there are a few little caveats but you know on the whole she's actually pretty easy to use i think so um what i'm going to do is start moving her from one uh one of the frames and you can see what she's capable of so around here um any sort of shaded area here you can grab hold of her and you can actually move the top part of her torso you can move it around like that and it naturally squashes and stretches a little bit like that um if you want to move any body part you just select the either top or bottom part of it and you will get a slightly different result if i select the top part you select that part and if i select the bottom part you move that part that's how constraints work in toon boom harmony and i haven't put any vpegs on her at all for this function because i wanted to make it as seamless as i possibly could so if i want to move her elbow i can move it like that if i want to move her hand i just grab the hand and i move that around like that if i want to move the pelvis i can move that around like that uh if i want to move let me just go here if i want to move the feet they behave in exactly the same way the knee behaves in the same way it's fairly self-explanatory um i have a graphic here let me just make this bigger and make that smaller so that we can just get the relevant information here i have a graphic here that represents her body and um i've put check boxes on various parts of an approximate to show the sort of controls that you might want to turn on and off depending on what you're doing so we'll start from the top the central part is a set of 3v pegs which allow easy manipulation of certain functions on her necklace not all of them if you want the complete set you just click that and then show deformers and then that's the complete lot but i thought it was particularly useful to just have these three because that's the type of thing you want to manipulate the most so the middle one allows me to do this and these two allow me to sort of shift the necklace up and down like that for extra you know flexibility these little stick things by the way if i select the one on the outermost part allows me to move all three whereas if i move any of the child ones they're able to do that kind of thing when i was animating her it barely came up except to animate all three like that but it gave me a little bit more flexibility if you wanted to move them around if i want to move the belt by the way i can just grab the center part and the belt gives the impression that it's kind of moving around in 3d space i was able to do something clever with the pivots to make it sort of move to the correct part just by moving around if you pull it up too far the illusion breaks so it has a limit of where it can go but that should be more than enough for the sort of work you need to do um there we go there if you need to move by the way before we go into all of this if you need to move body parts backwards and forwards in zed um you should be able to get it perfectly comfortably but you have to be mindful that there is not a breaking point but a point where you have to shuffle things around perhaps a bit more than normal so by holding down alt and forward and back you've got that but then of course the hand breaks so then you have to move that forward and then you've got it there you see what i mean you've just got that certain amount of shuffling to do and the same thing here if i move it back several times there we go and do that there i can even move it behind her body like that just do it several times enough that they can do it and then i think come on there we go oops there we go so eventually you'll get it but there's quite a lot of layering to to go with here so if it doesn't do it with like one press you may have to do it several times um takes a bit of getting used to it's a little bit different to a conventional puppet because there are an awful lot of layers for this thing to move in and out as a side note for future limbs i've made this process a lot simpler but um at the time when i was creating the empress um she she was a sort of testing point so there are certain things that i i know now i can do better but anyway so that one works for the necklace these ones here are things that turn on uh deformation scales and this is essentially an easy way of manipulating muscles on the character like that so um these are things which i am starting to get into a lot now um they are initially a little bit of a tricky thing to understand but once you get it they are actually fairly simple to use so um it allows me to just fatten and thin the muscles depending on what she's doing manually if i want to same thing with that there we go that sort of thing um try and keep the entrance point from a limb uh by eye as close as you can but the other stuff you know you if you i think you can sort of manipulate that and all sorts of things there are things you can do i think you can pull that whoops and pull that one back there we are like that so you've got you've got a certain amount of control over that sort of thing like that so these turn those on and off you say um now these diamond shaped v-pegs allow me to twist this part up or down depending on the sort of look that you're wanting the uh glove to do so it's just an easy way of getting quick for shortening on the arm if i was bending it right back like that that makes no sense but but you know if she was fighting bad girls and she had magic powers but for uh if she was doing that for example and you wanted to move the glove forwards you would do this and then you'd probably move that forwards a little bit just to make sure that it's in front of that blue bit there so that's that sort of thing there you go like that just pop that back and move that down a little bit so all these can do is up and down just to give you that kind of flexibility there like that now um did i do that one there we go this this also has the ability to fatten and thin it really is i just wanted that extra level of customizability because you never know when you're going to need it now these two are what's known as fk and ik for the hands so at the moment when i move her body around the hands stay completely dead to wherever they are and that's actually really useful if you're doing prop work if she's picking something up or leaning against the wall you just put her hand where you want it to be let me just do that now in fact there you go imagine she was leaning against a wall like that and then she just wants to move away oops move away like that you know how easy is that it's fantastic she's even holding on to her hip with minimal animation effort but sometimes you don't want that you want the arm to move with the body in which case you slot it down like that you may have to reposition it a little bit because it uses a different set of keyframes but now when i move the body around it moves with the body rather than against it so it very much depends on what you're doing if she was running i would have it on uh forward kinematics but if i wanted it you know leaning against the wall i would do it this way um maybe i like that now let's turn those off same sort of thing for the legs you've got the ability to fatten her thighs and things like that um same sort of thing with her boots you've got the ability to do that kind of thing so depending on whether they're further away or you know whatever um same sort of thing on the boots you can fatten and thin them and then you've got fk and ik for the feet so again with this added her foot moves around whereas when it's upwards it stays planted on the floor so these little things are quite useful i have to say by a little tip as well um if you want two things to sort of be attached if you just select them using shift it can sort of make her hand be sort of attached to her hips it's kind of a nice little feature there um now then moving on to her head oh actually not not just yet we'll explain this bit as well not more body stuff so i've divided the body into three parts you've got the head the tor the upper torso and the lower torso the upper torso can twist around like that and still maintain um the body parts in roughly the same positions just make sure that in the middle part that uh that uh what they call it necklace is flipping at the moment and you just want to make sure that you've got it in the right place but there we go that's the only little funny thing about that and then of course you've got the same deal with her um lower body there as well and if you want to move the entire body around you can use this so you've got quite a lot of flexibility there just be mindful occasionally of little bits like that you can pop back really easily just using arrow keys like that so it's not a big deal really um and little things like this you may need to sort of push backwards and forwards there we go like that you see so again it gives you a most of the control but then you'll have to go in and just tidy up a little bit and perhaps move move an element around to taste that sort of that sort of thing now then um the head now the head comprises let me just go in there quite a bit there we go the head comprises of a standard uh master controller with a twist so um if you notice when i let go of this her head shifts a little bit more and that was because i wanted to have the ability of shifting her neck manually as well as automatically and the only way i could do that was using an expression and expressions calculate their figure so to speak after something has been moved so that's why you get that little shunt when it sort of finally got its result don't need to go into too much detail here but suffice to say the controls to move her neck around will be shown in a second um she gets to a certain point here and there's a sort of like block where her head goes into as extreme sort of three quarters as possible and then it clunks to profile like that now i'm adding this bit because i had to make a little adjustment to the uh nose preview node just to make it work because i realized something had gone wrong but when you see her in certain poses her face looks slightly wrong when it comes to her nose but it actually will render quite correctly if you render the image actually cuts off certain bits of it and makes it look much much better then the preview gives the impression it does you see that huge great lump underneath and then here it's actually properly done um so what actually is happening here is um a certain amount of line uh adjustment is happening under the under the hood and um the way to get this to um look nice on the render on the opengl view is if you hold if you press the node button here the nose button here now you just have to make sure that you press play or sort of adjust it a little bit sometimes but it will give you a sort of preview of that area it only works where the camera is if i were to move the camera over let me just show you how this behaves come out of here a few more times come on there we go if i were to move the camera over so that her nose is not visible you'll notice the nose also slows down but it's really obvious that it starts it there and then doesn't bother there it's using what's known as a render preview node and it only renders the nose where it needs to be most i you know when i've been animating i haven't actually even turned that on it's occasionally if you want to see what something might well look like but i haven't ever found that it's come up as anything useful so you know that's how that works also um the way that her body is arranged let me just move her head into something a bit more attractive there we go um her body is arranged in three main areas and that's so that if you like a particular pose or you like part of a particular pose you can actually copy and paste the keyframe into the library for later use by subdividing into these three main areas the head the upper body and the lower body you've got the most flexibility for a character so if you if your character is sort of holding something but then walking all the walking animation and the legs and everything can be copied but the holding things animation can be copied in from something else so it just gives you that extra little flexibility there of combining animation with animation same with the head all the head stuff is contained there all the upper body stuff there and all the lower body so it's a way of you know splitting up the character into this much easier to understand color-coded area so that's the reason why these stripes exist and now back to the main tutorial this is controllable as well if you want to move her tiara around any point you can do that you know and it's sort of fully attached so again it uses a similar technology that's in the um the belt so that gives you quite a lot of freedom to move things around um now let's have a look now here's the controls for the head and we have one here for the eyes and that allows me to just sort of squish and give me a bit of extra control incidentally these eyes um have a set of um drawing substitutions like all the eyes all the um sort of body parts do in this puppet uh like the hands and the feet um so that gives you a set of blinks to work with so you just sort of click between those but you've also got the added interest of doing a little bit of that a little bit of wiggling around with the controller there oops let me turn that off um you have a set of deformers in the eyebrows which you can customize to any particular expression you want so you want to make it look a little bit sort of quizzical or um you know dreamworks eyes you can do that the middle button gives you a set of controls for her jaw and things like that let me just turn this off and show you what she can do so just by holding the jaw using the same sort of technology as i've done in the arms and legs and things you have the ability of her going like that so that's the first thing it makes her look more fleshy than just a normal character and it gives you a lot of control over that area but the nice thing as well it also has the ability to be re-sculpted using these dots so i can if i want to slightly re-sculpt her and make that shape a little bit nicer there i can puff out her cheeks a little bit more there i can do all sorts of things i can make them bigger smaller rotate them all sorts of things um i wouldn't touch these top ones quite so much but again it just gives you the extra freedom to just tighten that line if you need to but most of the time you don't again it's better not to touch things than to touch things but if you do need an extra bit of shaping there whatever that's available to you now these diamond shapes which are strangely not aligned to the rest of the head but they do you know it kind of works um these allow you to kind of manipulate and alter the shape of the mouth so if i wanted to sort of stick the um the cheek part up a little bit here i could do that could rotate a little bit i can sort of push that one back and everything else and then we've got this icon as well and that's this um buys into what i said earlier about uh moving the head so say for example i was moving the head front on like that and i wanted to do that sort of neck waggle thing that um seemed to be like you know charlie's angels and that sort of thing no you didn't that kind of thing or you just want her to investigate a little bit further forward with her neck or that sort of thing all you do is you click on this symbol here and then i would use the arrow keys to do this because you get an instant uh response or and using shift as well it's up to you but i can then just shift that over to give her a neck a little bit of pivoting sass you say that kind of thing and that sort of stuff is not cancelled out by the master controller that's the that's the benefit of this so once you've got her in an investigative position you can still move that and it's not going to cancel out the movement of the neck let's just move that back a bit now there we go so she can look indignant there inquisitive and then oh my god me you know that kind of thing so that's kind of useful it's kind of a new feature that i worked on it's not as good as i'd wanted it to be but it's the only way i could get it to work with the expressions so if you're interested in expressions have a look at the book pretty much the principles there are the principles that i used in the making of her there you go that sort of thing um she has two expressions she has uh smiling and just sort of plain so um go up or down depending on what sort of set of mouths you want to use um she has this as well r and l and they're the reason they're the wrong way around is because that's the way um toon boom seems to work it it's you know the right side was you know the right side and the left side it's a bit complicated but the way you do her hair let's just get this into position where you can see what i'm going uh doing if i just select the hair and i hit the show deformers button you get this now which one is it this line there we go i'm just going to move her hair over to there like that so swishing in the wind we don't need to see these deformers for this now but to make it sort of flow with the air what we can do is shift click r and l so they're both selected and then using uh arrow keys shift left and right i can or it i don't have to have shifts held down but to have left and right and i can create a key that will create a position for her wave to go in and um if i were to for example i don't know how well this is going to animate by the way this might look in fact i'm not going to show you because it could be really bad but if i if i create another key here and just create a key there and then just shift over a few times oops shift over a few times you have to have the cursor on the same screen as the um r and l by the way to do this so let's say i've done that a few times and then if i tween that it should there you go you see do a lovely wave of hair flowing in the wind and you've still got the ability to move it around like that if you want to and the wave will still be intact which is really nice um incidentally this brings us on to uh speed because at the moment as you can notice when i'm clacking away here or playing it back it's dropping quite a lot of frames and uh it's all right once it sort of plays back the first few times that's okay but it's it's still annoying i've got this fast button here and what that does is it stops i'll just turn the um deformers off and it stops a few of the cutters we're not talking about a huge amount of cutters here but we're talking just enough for it to be a problem so what i can do is just press that and you'll notice that not only have we got this great big red area here but also slight differences in the hands and a little bit in the head so it's a good enough working representation to work from but some of the lines and everything aren't quite as they will render i mean certainly this big thick line here will not come through when you actually render it this is the render view and this is you know what i mean so um for a fast view it does give you a lot it's a lot faster and you can sort of scrub much much better and you can move things around and all that sort of stuff so that makes it a lot easier to work with you know i will be mindful that um in harmony 21 um it might still be useful to have the fast button on but actually i've discovered that harmony 21 is so optimized that she actually behaves almost identically um i haven't had a chance to play around with her in terms of time line with harmony 21 so i don't know how that behaves but in certainly in terms of manipulating the character she is incredibly fast with harmony 21s so that was nice to know but for the rest of us who don't have harmony 21 um she's just as good in harmony 20 if you turn off uh if you turn on fast and then she's she manipulates a lot faster so you know that's why i put it in there um there we go it's much better so i think that's it or the only other other thing is that pretty much every part of her well not every part a lot of her has deformers but they're not envelope deformers so i've got a deformer in her arm which just gives you it gives you a a way to kind of realign certain parts of her or sort of change the tension and you know what i mean that sort of side of her as well um she's got in her torso uh the ability to just manipulate that and move that around a little bit so you've got that level of control if you need it to get you out of some tight spots but most of her um deformers are there she has buttocks for her legs because that's the way that they're constructed so be mindful of this extra area this dark area here that was necessary to make some of it work if you want the legs to go in front of her her midriff here uh this has a set of um uh deformers on it as well and what you do is you just sort of sculpt them to make it look as if the leg is suddenly in front like that so that's the way you do that if you and then when you've got the leg oops just selecting the wrong thing turn on fast that's better come on that's it and then when you've got the leg where you want it i think you have to press this a few times and then get that there you go like that you do have to kind of sculpt and move certain bits of her around so there's there's her um buttocks which also have um envelope deformers in so there is a certain amount of sculpting with certain areas to get out of this particular little issue i think if i'd had more time to play with i probably could have solved this problem but um as it is this is the only way that i could see to work it out and for the most part it's fine it's just like one or two frames that you need to sort of sculpt to i mean that's more or less all right particularly if she was moving very quickly but i mean how many times is she doing that unless she's doing the gang can you know or kicking an enemy or something so um you know what i mean it's uh just the main thing with her is that there's a lot of sort of fiddling about really to get things to the right places but she's there's not an awful lot to do and then you can just sort of sculpt and just get those extra little tiddly things but that's it it's not you're having not having to re-sculpt an entire thing for most stuff she's actually really fast why'd she look like that um so i think that's pretty much all of her i can't think of anything else that she needs to obviously i'll move that one back come on set uh come on you annoying what's going on there it's probably because the hair is really far back i'm having to there we go so yeah occasionally on some uh pictures you're going to have to do that but i have to say working with humanoid characters before she animates considering how realistic her movements are a lot faster than if i were having to sort of go in there and have to sort of sculpt every little bit because for the most part her muscles do that automatically just a few little moments where you just need to be a little bit more mindful and get things in the right positions you know what i mean but uh yeah well i hope you enjoy working with her she's some a bit of a labor of love but i did want to really tackle a more realistic character because they are the sort of thing that people sometimes want to do and they are notoriously difficult to do because of the sheer complexity and the logic of how they go together and everything else and it's a bit like an uncali valley if you do one bit wrong it's far more noticeable than with a cartoony character um so you know you've always got that element of um having to compete if you ever needed to put a deformer into a part of her body um then of course you've got the ability to do that but i've tried to only put deformers in areas that i thought were important um but you know since when am i going to need a breast that does anything other than be breast shaped you know what i mean i can manipulate a certain amount of it just with um transforming things like that or rotation so you know what i mean i didn't want to do too much oh i've got to put a curved deformer on here and a curved form on there because it it actually really slows things down and a big part of what i wanted to do with this character was to make a fast or reasonably fast complicated character so i hope i've managed to do that and i hope you get a lot of pleasure out of her and learn as much as you can from her construction and um how to animate and all that sort of stuff um good luck and thank you so much for funding my research into all of this um i'm nowhere near done i've got lots more things i want to research and put into the book there are in terms of the book there are techniques which i've done on other tests which aren't available on her that will be in the book such as texturing and line work and all this sort of stuff but um the way her limbs are constructed in particular will be in the book under the flesh section and as i say certain elements of it are much more refined they've been cleaned up made simpler and easier to use so i'm really happy about that but as she stands she's fun she's sassy and i really like her and i hope you do too thanks a lot and speak to you soon bye [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Oli

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Id: TS4h8tPByVc

Length: 32min 32sec (1952 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 19 2021