Toon Boom Harmony Tips 01-Drop Shadows on Puppet Rigs

The series is still mostly postponed due to my Weekend Headache as well as my airport cafe job as well as my Cat's oral health scare but that doesn't mean I can't get a head start right?

Any, have a look at this nice Puppet Rig of LUZ NOCEDA from OWL HOUSE.

This is not an official rig by Disney or Dana Terrace but rather a fan made rig made by this guy on GUMROAD who goes by COLM DOWLING. The rig is free by the way so If you have Toon Boom installed in your PC or Mac, here's the link to the rig:

https://colmartwork.gumroad.com/l/luzrig?layout=profile

Anyway, notice anything about Luz? 

Stumped?

That's because I finally found a way to do Drop Shadows on Puppet Rigs..... sort of.....

But first, A prelude:

Remember a time when animation was still done on traditional acetate celluloid?

Cruella Deville remembers..... 

I have stated many times on this blog that when cartoons and anime switched to the digital ink and paint system of today, something was lost in translation.

Sure, the drawings were still done on paper before being scanned into the SGI Workstations and later x64 workstations of today but coloring the characters with tools meant for a high resolution digital art form does have some issues to deal with.

I've read many stories about how many artists in the 90s refused to switch to DIGITAL INK AND PAINT because to them, if animation was to be inked and painted completely on uber expensive workstations, the effort to make them aesthetic enough would be lost.

Don Bluth is one of those people. Until Anastasia, he refused to allow his films between ROCK-A-DOODLE to PEBBLE AND THE PENGIUN to get the digital treatment with his argument being that he fought the digital system in an effort to have art that he can physically touch the dried acrylic paint.

If you don't believe me, look up the ANASTASIA DVD featurettes on YOUTUBE and wait till he mentions the digital process where he admits how he fought the system.

Anyway, back to the main topic.

I was obsessed with the older style of 2D Animation but considering that the North American industry says no to the old techniques due to budgetary concerns, I started to experiment with the Puppet Rigged method of animation.

Then HAZBIN HOTEL was released on AMAZON PRIME.

I mentioned on a January 23 2024 Post on how intrigued I was about Hazbin Hotel's use of drop shadows.

But until I've seen a single episode on my free time, I'm going to assume that the series is puppet rigged..... but if so, then what are the producers doing to combat the puppet rigged nature and allow the drop shadows to be used?

I use Toon Boom Harmony Premium as my choice of 2D animation software... in fact, I was encouraged by my Art School to pay for the Premium Package because it has more features for puppet-rigged animation and nodes.

Honestly, I care more about the nodes than I care about the way puppet rigs works so anyway, with my knowledge of NODES, I experimented with ways to manipulate.

One thing I did was to add drop shadows to my animation cels.

The way I did it on Photoshop was to just add my Cel and Background to my canvas, then select the cel layer, add a drop shadow to the cel, merge the layers together, use a grain filter and fiddle around with the settings.

And there you go. A wonderful looking cel of the CLIQUE from my show concept MARYLANDIA.

With animation, it's different. Photoshop is strictly a raster graphics software but TOONBOOM uses vector graphics for it's Inks so how I did it is I just focus on animating my character on my WACOM TABLET. Then I color my character using the paint bucket tool.

Once I'm satisfied with my results, I go into my NODE Graph and insert my nodes for things like Pegs, Composites, and most importantly at least for me, SHADOWS.

Since the shadow has a set default, I had to go to TOONBOOM's live render mode so I can see how the shadows will look.

If anybody's concerned about my computer and whether or not my system will be hampered speed-wise, I'm running a 12-Core AMD Ryzen 9 7900x3D CPU paired with a 16GB GIGABYTE EAGLE RTX 4080 GPU as well as having 32GB of DDR5 Dual-Channel U-DIMM RAM in my system so It's pretty fast for my needs.

Of course, If you've seen the cel of SHASTA above, I also drew a Dry Brush Blur because I needed to punctuated the action so it also needed it's own Drop Shadow as shown on the Node Editor above.

Anyway, about Puppet Rigs,

"WHO YOU CALLING PUPPET RIGGED YA TURD!!!"

I barely understand why the node construction of the rigs isn't like that of MAYA which I'm more accustomed to. Because of that node construction, I thought there was no way for my to add my coveted DROP SHADOWS to the TVG nodes on the editor.

And then LUZ NOCEDA proved me wrong that fateful Monday March 25 2024.

To a logical extent anyway. I just needed a quick way out of this so I can dedicate more time to these blogposts so I just took whatever combination of Nodes I could find, connect that to the main cluster as well as the composite and here we go. 

The above Drop Shadow applied to the LUZ toonboom rig was just my quick and janky attempt to do drop shadows on puppet rigs and...... well....... I still got a long way for me to go.

If I had more time, I would have to go in depth into the rig and apply each shadow node to each TVG node of Luz's body construction as well as connect those SHADOW Nodes to the COMPOSITE nodes on my editor but let me know if this quick method is ok. For me, I'm going to leave it at a grey area.

And this method of Drop Shadows I did to the Luz rig was only on Luz herself. There are other Rigs out there. Whether they be from GUMROAD or by another studio, the rigs are constructed differently.

Yes... Just like us humans aren't created equal, 2D Puppet Rigs aren't created equal. They may have a different system to how they were constructed.

Well this post didn't go well for me but then again, life issues, cat health, my headache, and of course my Job at the Cafe so I barely could dedicate all the time I had for a proper post about TOONBOOM so I whipped up whatever I could with my favorite topic which is Drop Shadows.

And for those who may ask what version of Toon Boom I'm using?

I'm using TOON BOOM HARMONY PREMIUM 22 so yeah I'm pretty much up to date...

And yes, TOONBOOM works very well on AMD CPUs. Despite the website listing mostly just Intel on their requirements page, AMD CPUS still work very well with TOONBOOM due to both INTEL and AMD sharing the exact same x64 instruction set.