Usually because the rig I was working on was different to the last one. There's been various times when I figured it out, and then always found myself at square one when I tried again.

I kept running into the issue of wanting to cut away the head for a Side/Profile view of a rig. The only downside to using bitmap layers in Toon Boom Harmony is that, it may make for a bigger file size (but we have fast computers these days!!) and pixelation will occur when zoomed in.Gosh, I hope I am able to adequately explain this one! If it's not clear, feel free to comment for further info. Some features of using bitmap tools are texture brushes, adjusting opacity and flow of your brush and you can create really great paintings. You can create unlimited amounts of colour and gradients and create seamless transitions which can make for a pretty picture. There are advantages to using bitmaps however. Meaning, you will start to see the individual squares and it will appear to be blocky.

However, when zoomed in, your image will start to pixelate. Depending on the resolution, while viewed from a distance, or at the actual size, your image will look fine and not evident that it is made up of many squares or pixels. When you paint in bitmap, you are essentially painting in many pixels which form your image. Bitmap graphics are made up of individual squares known as pixels. If you are used to using ‘Photoshop’ or ‘Corel Painter’ or any other painting software, then you will know all about bitmap graphics.

We move along now to Part 2 in this series of introductory tutorials using Toon Boom Harmony’s bitmap layers and bitmap tools.

Toon boom tutorial