What are the different types of game exports in Harmony?

There are two main pipelines for exporting data from Harmony to your game engine. Which one you use will depend on your needs and the game engine you are using.

Rigged Animation export

Rigged Animation export is appropriate when you want the file sizes to be as small as possible. You can convert data directly from your Harmony scene and incorporate it into a game engine. 

The following information can be extracted with this type of export:

• Hierarchy information
• Drawing information
• Keyframe animation data
• Deformations (Game bones only)
• Cutters
• Transparency nodes
• Timing columns

About this type of export:

• This is the lightest export, and will keep file sizes small, which is ideal for mobile applications.
• Features like Morphing or Curve and Envelope deformers can be used, but will need to be baked out into drawings for the game engine.
• You can use Cutters, but you cannot have more than one in a hierarchy chain.
• Game Bone deformers can be used without having to bake it to drawings.
• When you extract the data, you'll have sprite sheets that contain only the drawings of the body parts used in your Harmony scene file.
• Supports multiple animations, such as idle, run, and jump, while reusing the same rig and drawings.
• Is fully integrated with the Unity game development rendering engine. If you are creating your game in Unity, you have a seamless pipeline without the need to re-treat the data in your game engine.

Frame-by-Frame Export

Using this format, you can export from Harmony using an image sequence, which can be recompiled into a sprite sheet.

About this type of export:

• You can use any of the tools in Harmony when you animate.
• The sprite sheets can become quite heavy and end up as large textures to process in the game. This is fine for many games, like console games, but is not ideal for mobile device game development.
• There is an option in Harmony that allows you to export your frame-by-frame animation to the EaselJS game engine. EaselJS is a javascript web compatible game engine. It uses a json data structure to map each frame to an entry in the sprite sheet. The data structure is easy to understand and can be adapted or converted to a different game engine if needed.