Rebrands Animation Products in Harmony Family

Toon Boom is consolidating its portfolio of animation software into just two products — Harmony and Storyboard Pro. In addition, an optional subscription model is being introduced for both products.

Harmony is being broken down into three different editions aimed at different categories of user. Aimed at enthusiasts and hobbyists, Harmony Essentials takes its cues from Toon Boom Studio and supports simple paperless and cut-out animation projects. One step up the ladder is Harmony Advanced, which emulates Toon Boom Animate with full support of paperless projects but only simple cut-out animation features. And Harmony Premium will be roughly equivalent to Toon Boom Animate Pro as a full-on animation package for cut-out style animation as well as paperless.

At the same time, new features will be introduced in the new release of Harmony 12. The bitmap brush is being improved, with a dual-brush capability that allows more organic-looking images to be drawn in bitmap mode. "We support both vector and bitmap drawing styles, and this is a little love on the bitmap side." Toon Boom Director of Marketing Bob Bennett told StudioDaily. Workflow improvements should make it easier to apply deformers, and a new Light Shading feature allows artists to quickly add tones and highlights by specifying placement of a light source in the drawing.

Toon Boom is also working to support more industry standards, adding OpenFX plug-in support to the compositor and supporting the import of Alembic and Collada 3D file formats. New versions of Harmony will allow character animation cycles to be previewed inside the Unity game engine before the character is actually exported. Finally, Bennett said Harmony has gotten significant performance upgrades, with faster playback of complex cut-out character rigs and an overall 65 percent increase in rendering speed.

The desktop subscription options for the software will live alongside traditional perpetual licenses, Bennett said. Monthly and annual subscribers will get access to new product updates as they're released; some support options for perpetual licenses also entitle users to those updates, though they are not included in the basic license. A desktop subscription for Harmony essentials is $23/month, or $180/year (compare to $375 for a full perpetual license), and Harmony Premium runs $109/month, or $876/year (or $1975 for a perpetual license).