Learning Toon Boom Harmony for personal project

VinDrawins Blogpost #2

Hello there 👋, I know this post is very late I mean I didn't post anything last week 👀. I wanted to post but I was very busy learning this new tool that the time it is taking is a lot 😕.

I'm working on the 360 rig of my OC Vin. Actually, just weeks ago I got a task at my office to do character animation and I first learned and then applied using Adobe After Effects tool, seriously that was unbelievable for me after watching the complete animation, that I did that 🤦‍♂️. I wanted to do animation but I did it and it was the first step (probably 2nd) 🤔. Then I realized why I gave up on learning Toon Boom Harmony at first. 😐 Yeah, I created the character but probably it was a lot to learn at that time (last year) to learn character animation and new tool as I already started using Blender after a long time 👀.

I think making 3-part-finger will be good, I don't know how difficult it will be while animating but let's see how this goes

Coming forward to last week, I think 50% of rig of Vin is completed. Making the node structure of hand was the most daunting work 😮‍💨. I'm totally burning my brain to work hard on both (office & personal work) and I chose that pain myself. I could have made my life easy by doing only office and chilling watching movies-series, isn't? But I wanted to (had to) level up for many reasons like I did engineering but doing design work 🙄, learning quicker & keeping up with new industry updates to find ways to save myself from AI invasion 🤧, proving my worthiness to my past self 🫡, etc. So yeah, I'm down to be called a workaholic but also I do watch movies on weekends and series on weekdays (just to let my brain stay fresh with visuals & animation).

Progress till now, most of the structuring is done for FRONT PART, if you notice there are no pocket and neck color in this design. I thought it will be great if I add it later once I make all the sides of character.

About the rig, I'm using Toon Boom Harmony. I decided this after watching single episodes of Hit-Monkey 🤯 (almost fully animated in Toon Boom), and Gravity Falls, Rick and Morty (the type of animation style usually used in animated TV shows). It's a 2D animation type called puppet animation which needs a lot of tricks to make beautiful animation with limits 😮.

Toon Boom Harmony is animator specific tool, especially for TV-show/series and movies.

Right now, my goal with this is to first complete this rig of Vin and do some test animation, if it works as per what I imagined, then do a similar rig for my other 2 OCs (SuperVin & Tara). And then I can start making some animated shorts of 1-2 minutes for my YouTube and Instagram 😉, isn't this a cool idea? 😏 because I just have to rig once, after that, I just have to do the animation for content and as many as possible, just need to do background illustration with respect to the content. After some time when I become comfortable with animation and when I see that people have started looking at my work, I'll start working on my Solaris project 🤫 which is on hold as it was supposed to be a webcomic but after getting some experience with this Toon Boom Harmony tool, I think I can make a short animated series (if possible) 🤐.

Solaris project character silhouette, VinDrawins Project

Ironically, the reason why first wrote the concept of the Solaris project was to learn the animation using Toon Boom Harmony, it was inspired from Toon Boom's Duke's game film (click here) 🤭 but when started using this tool it was too heavy to understand at first (that was in Dec 2022), but long after that, in May I saw there's webcomic contest in India as webcomic app promotion. That's when I took that short story which I created for an experimental short film and turned it into a 10-episode story 🤦‍♂️, simply expanding the world around the character 👀. Also, did the character designs of the protagonist team but after I got too busy with office work where I needed to understand some concepts of 3D animation because of that I put that project on hold again 😐. Now, that I have the story and I'm able to learn this Toon Boom Harmony, I think it's just about time when I do some animated tests with my OCs. So, for now, I think I can finish this 360 rig of Vin by next week, I guess I'm getting close to that. 👍

So yeah, thanks for reading till here, hope you're keeping up with my updates. Definitely, this is a place where everything will be documented. So, don't forget to subscribe (if you haven't).

See you next week, happy weekend 🙂