TIM'S NOTES ON 3D RENDERING WITH TOON BOOM HARMONY

I broken down 2D 3D shots in Harmony into "tiers" with Harmony rendering system.

Depending on the production requirement and software, you can do the following with Toon Boom Harmony.

1. Making 3D elements using Harmony tools and shading them directly using Harmony, this is like making buildings or  \objects directly into Harmony and using the shading tools to shade the environment to look the way you want.
You will get a clean render with squares, rectangle or other basic shapes since you are using flat planes to make three dimensional objects.  The native render is fast and do not need any other software.

2. Import 3d model and render it upon import - You can import a 3D model and align it to your flat camera sequence, it will render in as a flat image that is imported and then you can draw or paint on top.  Make image filters with it. But it will still be a flat 2D image (no rotation or 3D information) fast to render and will have anti alias due to it's open gl render on import.

3. Render out Open GL Passes using Harmony : This is importing a 3D object and keeping it into 3D, you can do camera or 3D shape animation and then render out using Open GL image export from the drop menu. The problem is that Open GL rendering does not commit the Alpha map from the object to the image export, so I have to usually add a back drop (green screen or red screen) and will have alias artifacts if not taken care of properly when re importing the image sequence.

4. Open GL with Image Processing on 3D - One of my favorites,  I import a 3D object and directly in the software manipulate it, doing 3D animation and trying to separate the objects to shade them. I can get renders that are nice looking but I have to render it 8K to get the edges or the textures to look good during rendering. I can make faux lighting and shadows, faux AO and surface maps, so I think can bring a lot to the table with the in Harmony render system. (Use this for speed and retro or unique 2D 3D look development.)

5. You will need Maya, for this step.  If you want to do full 3D third party render, passed into Harmony

- It uses Deep Pixel tech , its very good, 2D vector characters are baked and sent to Maya to render inside it's software and composited  automatically with the 3D element, making it a very smooth experience for 2D and 3D.  Have to make the 3D in Maya for it to work.

- It's very expensive , batch render is x3 the time as it requires to send back and forth files between Maya and Harmony

- You can use different render systems with Maya (Maya software, Arnold, etc)

- The look is premium ,  it works perfectly and gives the 2D 3D result that we expect from such a combination

Some other ways to do it :

6. Match move everything ; The traditional way *** Old school trace on top of a 3D image render, bring it into Harmony

- Set up a 3D scene and camera move in 3D Max, Maya, C4D, Blender etc , render it out, match move or piece together using images and composition inside Harmony
               

7.  Using Scripts *** Untested , Not Documented yet

   - Do 3D Modeling and animation in 3D Max, Maya, Blender. etc

- Setup it up for export fbx 

- Get trial of Maya, import FBXs to Maya and build a scene to use the "Harmony XML scripts" (untested)

Then import to Harmony

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8. Storyboard Pro

- Allows for imports of FBX files from other software into Storyboard Pro and animate the camera and 3D models

- Export the camera Storyboard to Maya and to Harmony and lets you keep the camera and model to import to Maya as well