Puppet

As someone who had prior experience creating a simple arm puppet in After Effects, I was excited to learn how to make a more complex one in Toon Boom. I decided to create a puppet of one of my original characters holding a gun and sort of going crazy.

Going into this project was a bit overwhelming at first, since I had to upgrade to Harmony premium and had no experience with the node view. Creating the puppet itself was fun, and since this was the first time I added color to an animation, this helped me get used to the stroke tool. Honestly, learning how to add pegs and learning how to understand the node view took a bit of time, but I eventually got the hang of it. Adding key frames and ease was probably the easiest part since I have lots of keyframe / graph editing experience in After Effects, and it was relatively the same (if not easier) to do in Harmony.

Overall, I feel like making puppets can make simple movements easier for simple characters / objects, but for things that I like to do (such as moving characters at different angles), puppets are very limiting and I think I'll use the frame by frame for most of my work. I'm grateful that I know how to create puppets in Harmony though!