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Harmony 17: Introducing new tools for traditional animation

The drawing tools you need for the storytelling you want

Toon Boom launched 25 years ago to offer animators the tools to express their creativity and tell their stories. In celebration of our anniversary, we are releasing Harmony 17 — a special edition of our industry-standard animation suite that gives students, freelancers and independent artists the same powerful tools that studios depend on every day.

Harmony 17 is a complete animation production pipeline packed with 40 new-and-improved features, including upgrades to the software’s drawing tools, node view, effects and compositing that make Harmony the preferred choice for professional animators. Looking towards the next 25 years, we aim to empower animation from every angle — across a diverse range of stories and skill levels.

With Harmony 17’s improved drawing tools, traditional animators have more control over their art than ever thanks to an upgraded drawing engine, stabilizer tool and perspective guides. Whether you are a frame-by-frame animator, a cleanup artist or a freelancer, putting stylus to tablet has never felt more direct or expressive.

Explore Harmony 17’s new-and-improved drawing tools below.

Discover Harmony 17’s artist-focused drawing tools

Improved Drawing Engine

Harmony 17’s brush and pencil tools look and feel better than ever, powered by Toon Boom’s all-new drawing engine for more creative control across vector, textured vector, and bitmap modes. Rely on your drawing tools with on-screen strokes that are closer to your stylus — and your creative vision. Picture: less noticeable segments between straight lines and curves, and more confidence that what you draw is what you get.

Stabilizer Tool

Interested in drawing smoother lines and curves alongside sharper angles? Harmony 17 includes a new Stabilizer tool which creates an optional trail between the pen input and the brush stroke with two modes: average and pulled string. The Average stabilizer mode trails the stroke along with the pen’s input, reducing jitter; Pulled String allows artists to pull the brush stroke, allowing for more precision when drawing sharp angles. Both stabilizers reduce natural shakes and inconsistencies when drawing, and allow for more control over the end result.

Curvilinear Perspective Guides

Bring a fresh point of view to your drawing tools with new adjustable perspective guides, making for more precise camera pans, panoramas, true-to-life scenes and an expansive, cinematic look — all while helping you stay on-deadline by being more efficient. Curvilinear drawing guides have curving perspective lines with scenes that feature continuous 3-point, 4-point and 5-point (fisheye) perspectives, large-panning backgrounds and more.

Adjustable Pen Pressure Sensitivity

You can have more control over the pen input than ever with adjustable pen pressure in Harmony 17. By adjusting the curve for pen pressure input, users can make adjustments that allow them to draw more expressively, get more line variation with less pressure or position their pens without making unintended marks.

Tilt Sensitivity and Pen Rotation

Brush strokes get an added hand-drawn feel with Harmony 17’s Tilt Sensitivity and Pen Rotation. Change the shape, pen tilt and rotation of your brush while drawing and create flawless line art and calligraphy when using styluses that offer tilt and rotation data.

Isometric Projection Guide

Do you animate for games? You’ll feel like you’ve won with Harmony 17’s levelled-up Isometric Projection Guide. It’s perfect for creating assets for side-scroller and third-person overhead games; when enabled, strokes snap to be parallel to one of three projected lines, with no vanishing point.

Drawing Ruler

Clean up character and prop drawings quickly with Harmony’s new Drawing Ruler. Drag an adjustable ruler across your screen, with pen strokes constrained to the ruler’s line, and shift to snap to 15-degree increments.

Camera Alignment Guides

Need a visual reference while laying out a scene? The new Camera Alignment Guides add horizontal and vertical guides to Harmony’s camera view or perspective view. Plus, the transform tool’s bounding boxes snap to the new guides.

Experience Harmony 17 now!

Harmony 17 is available today in English, Japanese, Simplified Chinese and Spanish. Try it for yourself, for free, for 21 days here.

From June 11 to August 31, 2019, get 25% off your purchase of a Harmony 17 annual licence. Explore our pricing options.