What format and appearance should a custom pencil line have?

If you want to create an image and use it as a custom pencil line/texture in Harmony, you have to make sure the image and artwork follow some simple rules in order for it to work well as a pencil line. Take note of the following guidelines when creating an image for custom Harmony pencil lines.

If you would like to know how to import these custom images as pencil lines, see How do I import a custom pencil line?

Image file types

A pencil line can be made in any image creation software, including Harmony and Storyboard Pro. Just make sure your custom line image is saved/exported in a format that Harmony recognises. The following formats are accepted file types for custom pencil line imports:

• Portable Network Graphic (.png)
• Photoshop Document (.psd, .psb)
• Tagged Image File Format (.tif)
• Truevision TARGA (.tga)
• Silicon Graphics Image (.sgi)

Image size and shape

Pencil lines in Harmony do not behave the same way as brushes do. A pencil line texture is a shape that is repeated over and over again along a vector spline. This means that the shape and nature of the artwork has to follow specific guidelines in order for the pencil line to work well once imported.

Canvas/image shape: 

• Rectangular with a longer width and shorter height.
• The longer the texture, the less often it will repeat itself along the stroke, but watch out for file sizes.

Canvas/image size: 

• Crop the canvas as close as possible to the top and bottom of the texture:

• A good size for a pencil line file is around 1024 x 40, but you can adjust the size according to your needs.

Pencil line texture and properties 

The actual artwork created to form the pencil line can be any texture, however there are a few things to keep mind:

Texture type/style:

• For a continuous texture, the ends of the lines should touch either side of the canvas. If you want the texture to be seamless, the part of the line that touches the right side of the canvas should match up perfectly with the one on the left side. 

• If you want a dotted or interrupted line, leave equal spaces on either side of the canvas.

Artwork guidelines:

• Be mindful of bitmap quality. Try for clear textures but optimized files sizes.
• The background of the pencil line artwork should be 100% transparent.
• Harmony will import any custom pencil line as greyscale, so it will not recognise any colour included with the original artwork. It will use the range of values in the greyscale to define transparency, and colour can be applied once the line is imported.

Once you are done, you can import your custom line. See How do I import a custom pencil line? for more information.

Pencil Line Requirements Checklist

Below is a summary of the above requirements: