Are there guidelines for animating game assets in Harmony?

How you animate your game assets in Harmony depends on the workflow used and the optimization required. This article will give you general tips on animating gaming assets. 

Creating animation in Harmony

Before creating your assets in Harmony, ask yourself the following questions as they all have an impact on how you design, build, and animate the characters:

• What platforms will your game be created for? Windows, Mac, Mobile, iOS, PS, XBOX, etc.
• What game engine will you be using?
• What animation style will be used to create the look of the game? Hand drawn, cut-out, with textures, etc.

During the process, you will need to:

• Rig characters (if using cut-out animation).
• Animate characters in Harmony (paperless or cut-out).
• Extract or export the Harmony data.
• Import the Harmony data into the game engine.

About export for game assets

Depending on the type of game you’re creating, you may need to limit your animation when animating for games. You can explore with your developers the limitations of the platforms you’re exporting to, and what your game engine supports.

There are two types of exports available in Harmony:

• Rigged Animation Export: If you're creating mobile games, you may want to keep the file sizes small and playback fast on all devices. This means you will have to limit yourself to simple keyframe animation with as few drawing swaps as possible. This type of export is ideal for light assets.
• Frame-by-Frame Export: If you’re making a game for consoles like the PS or Xbox, then you have the freedom to create larger textures. You may want to animate frame-by-frame, with a cut-out character, or both. This type of export results in heavier assets.

Creating optimized animation for games

Here are some tips for efficient, lightweight animation. For tips on optimizing game assets, see Are there guidelines for creating game assets in Harmony?

Animation for both Frame-by-Frame and Rigged Animation exports:

• The bigger the drawings are in the Drawing view, the more pixels they will occupy in the texture size on the sprite sheet. When setting up your rig, do not not scale individual layers by the Transform tool and a keyframe. If you want to scale things up or down, use the Select tool. This will keep things the same relative size on the sprite sheet. When you export the sprite sheets, you can also set the resolution of the sheet so the drawings can be scaled down for smaller devices.
• Only drawings which are exposed in the scene will be exported to the sprite sheet. For example, if you have 10 drawings in your Drawing Substitution view, but only two of them are showing in your scene, only those two will be exported. This keeps the sprite sheet as tight as possible.

Animation for Rigged Animation export only:

• Use mainly transformations, such as move, rotate, scale, and skew.
• Create additional drawing swaps only when needed.
• If you use Morphing or deformers other than Game Bones, you’ll need to bake out the drawings when exporting. Don’t bake out an entire sequence if you want to keep the number of drawings small, choose only necessary drawings. See How do I export animations to Unity that contain non-compatible deformers or effects?