Good Evening Folks!
I’ve decided to start a rigging course on my YouTube in this slow time here in the Canadian Industry to keep me busy and help level up some people interested in learning rigging.
I have taught introductory and intermediate courses for Harmony in the past and will pretty much be setting the course up very similarly…but that’s for another post.
A more in-depth explanation of this can be found in the video on my YouTube channel which is at the end of this post.
So what are the preferences I use so yours functions the same as mine in the tutorials and why do I use them?
General
Save Scene Automatically: I’m sure at least once we have all done this (my students did it multiple times). You are working away in the zone, two hours go by, the file crashes and you lose everything, You proceed to curl up in the fetal position and give up. Ok…maybe not the last part…but…you get the idea. This prevents this from ever happening. I set the timer to 15 minutes AND get it to ask me to save. The reason being, now every 15 minutes I have a reminder to get up, drink some water, look away from the screen to reduce eye fatigue etc.
Focus on Mouse Enter: With this turned on, whatever window your mouse is over is selected. You don’t have to click on it first. Yeah! Time saver!
Shortcut Zoomes on Mouse: When you zoom in on a window, rather than zooming into the center of the window, it zooms in wherever your cursor is.
Flat Toolbar: By default, this is turned off. If you like the drop boxes go for it. Personally, I find there are a bunch of tools I don’t use and I’m not a fan of the drop box so this lets me lay out and arrange the menu in a way that makes sense to me. Once you reload Harmony with the glat toolbar, right-click on it to customize it.
Default Separate Position for Pegs: This is a must when rigging! This ensures you can play with the x, y and z data on its own without impacting each other.
Stop Motion Keyframe: This is just personal preference but I don’t want Harmony guessing at anything I’m doing at the start. I was to just create frames where I want when I want, refine them, and THEN tell Harmony to take a guess at what I want….and I say take a guess because sometimes the tweeting is…well…interesting.
Default Pass Through Composites: If this is turned off, Harmony will automatically make Bitmap comps. That’s fine for things like the eyes where the highlight will ALWAYS be on top of the pupil, which is ALWAYS on top of the iris. these comps also take less processing power…BUT you can’t nudge elements with it. Make sure the default is pass-through and then you can manually change the few you WNT to be bitmaps to bitmaps.
Levels of Undo: I have it set to 250 and my computer can handle that without bogging down. You might have to experiment with numbers. Just make sure it’s at least 100. You will be surprised how fast those 100 things happen when you are building an arm out and then realize a better way of doing it and want to back out.
Undoable Selections (unchecked): With this turned on, your selections become part of the undo chain. Not only does this use up undos, it also means if you move an element to grab another element, rather than being able to hit undo and keep that back element selected, it just unselects what you grabbed and moves the element back.
Camera
Initial Animation Mode (OFF): Personal preference, but I just like having animation mode turned off until I turn it on so I don’t make keyframes where I don’t want them.
Node View
Middle Moue Button Pan (OFF): With this turned off, I can still use the spacebar as the hotkey to pan, but it frees up the middle mouse button to make it SIGNIFICANTLY easier to grab groups of nodes you highlight. You won’t have to be right on top of a node, you can just middle mouse anywhere in the node view and it moves the group of nodes that are selected.
XSheet
Initial Animation Mode (OFF): If you want less info in your xsheet, just keep drawings, show selection, and center on checked. If you use expressions while rigging you can leave that on also. turn the rest off
Drawing
Brush Size Cursor: Makes it easier to draw because you can see the size of your brush in the window rather than just a crosshair
Multiwheel Colour Picker: Personal preference on which you prefer
Timeline
Reduce Indentation: Makes it WAAAAAAY easier to read the timeline view once your rig has elements parented together
Overwrite exposure during drag and drop: If this is on when you click say frame two and drag it to frame 4, frame 1 extends and overwrites to frames 2 and 3. To me, this makes more sense than the default of if I pick up frame two and move it to frame four, frame 1 becomes frame one and 2, frame 3 is still there and then you dropped a frame into frame 4.
OpenGL
Enable Composite Pass Through for All: To be honest…not 100% sure what this does but having it on has fixed OpenGL glitches where elements are not layering the same way they are layering in the render view.
Advanced
Support Overlay and Underlay Arts: You for sure want this on as in my tutorials we use all these layers. Makes for building a mouth nice and easy,
Animate Using Animation Tools (OFF): FOR THE LOVE OF GOD TURN THIS OFF! We do NOT want animation on our drawings. We want all transformations on pegs!
Follow Node View Parenting: I have this turned on based on advice from a colleague. As it was explained, by default, when you use B and ShiftB to go up and down a hierarchy it uses the timeline hierarchy. With this on it uses the node view, so sometimes it goes through fewer elements.