Game Rigging Guidelines

For complete procedures on how to rig a character, see About Character Rigging.

The following is a list of general guidelines to keep in mind when rigging your character. As you're planning the character rig for your game, keep in mind the style of the character, and create your custom colour palette. However, there are some limitations to consider if you plan to extract the game data:

• Nudge layers in Z space if you need to reorder layers. However, significant Z offsets are not supported within a character rig.
• Make every layer in your game engine a separate scene in Harmony. If you have two characters at different depths, put them in separate scene files.
• Don’t use 3D space. If you want to set things up in 3D space, you can do this when you get to your game engine.
• Set your pivot points on Peg layers using the Rotate tool to set the pivot on the entire layer. Peg pivots are recommended over drawing pivots. You should also set the pivot points on your drawing layers, even if you don’t animate on them, as this will allow you to retrieve the information later on in the game engine if you need to put an anchor on a drawing layer.
• Don’t use Morphing. This is not yet supported in game engines.
• Be mindful of where you put your character before exporting. The master pivot of your exported game object will be the center of your Harmony scene (0,0).
• Be sure to have a Display at the end of your hierarchy.
• When rigging, keep in mind that some nodes are not supported by the exporter. As a result, the node structure would not be interpreted well by game engines. It is therefore recommended that you avoid using complex node structures. To do so:
  • Build your character out of Drawings attached to Pegs. Pegs can then be connected to other Pegs to form Hierarchies.

  • You should have all Pegs connected to a single Master Peg at the top of your Node view

  • Drawings should generally connect to Composites to determine the order of Drawings shown on-screen

  • If Drawings need to change order during animation, you can bump the z-depth to change which Drawing shows first

  • If you can't get your animations working well with just Drawings and Pegs, there are some other nodes you can use that are possible to export:

    • Cutters - Generally only cut one Drawing against one other Drawing (eg. cutting a face to the bounds of a head). You cannot 'daisy chain' one Cutter's output into another Cutter's input.

    • Game Bone Deformations - Generally only deform one Drawing. The bone skeleton can branch. Kinematic Outputs can be used attach Drawings to the ends of bones (eg. foot on the end of a leg)

  NOTE you are still able to use more complicated node strucures within 'bake_groups'. See Using Bake_Groups.

Keeping these tips in mind will allow you to create a tight, efficient 2D game character in Harmony while taking advantage of all the great tools.

Here are some things you should do:

• Create a simple parent-child relationship hierarchy in the Timeline view.
• Use peg layers to contain keyframe animation data, set to Separate Position.
• Use drawing layers to draw on, creating new drawings when needed.
• Use the Rotate tool to set the pivot points on the peg layers.
• Name your layers properly so if you need to fetch a specific layer’s pivot point later on in the game engine, you can easily recognize the layer you need. If you have a top-level Group A, which has a child group inside it (Group B), and the drawing layer is a child of Group B, then the drawing layer is exported as A_B_DrawingLayer.
• Set your anchors where you want to have your pegs show in Unity as transforms, see—Setting Anchors.

You can use any of the drawing tools you want: Pencil and Brush tools, textured lines, solid areas, and gradients. Each individual drawing will be rendered out and assembled into a sprite sheet later.