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Octo Rig Composer

▶Video tutorial — coming soon

A Master Controller composer for Toon Boom Harmony.

Harmony's Master Controller is a scripting surface. Octo Rig Composer is the tool that turns it into a rig you build rather than a script you write: you lay out controls and pose layers in a tree, pose your character with Harmony's own tools, tag the frames, and press Compose. ORC generates one runtime script that wires deformers, pegs, drawing substitutions, drivers, constraints, eye tracking and visibility into a single Master Controller node.

Nothing is written to your scene until you press Compose.

Try it

The Master Controller widgets ORC composes are the same ones you author with. These are live — drag them.

What it does

  • A rig, in a tree

    Controls, pose layers, knobs, drivers, constraints, look-ats and visibility groups in one outliner. Where a node sits is what it keys across — drag it somewhere else and its key domain changes with it.

    The Outliner

  • Frames-first posing

    Pose with Harmony's real tools — deformers, pegs, drawing substitutions — and press F6 to tag the frame. ORC stores a frame reference, not a delta, so tweaking that frame later and re-composing just works.

    Keying

  • Dimensions that stack

    A pose layer keys across its own grid, plus its control's turnaround, plus a knob — up to six axes, blended at runtime. Drivers and look-at fields reach eight.

    Dimensions & Key Domains

  • Drivers

    Sliders, checkboxes, combo sliders and 2-D pads that write any Harmony attribute, swap drawings, or drive other drivers. Global, or keyed per snap. With release/hold influence.

    Drivers

  • Look-At

    Two independent modes — Tracked Pegs for irises and pupils, Deform Follow for lids and skin. Multi-pair, with convergence, squash, bulge and per-curve weights.

    Look-At

  • Constraints

    Copy a source peg's channels onto targets, or lock them in place, using Harmony-native column sharing. Gate one on and off with a checkbox driver.

    Constraints

  • Visibility Groups

    Group widgets and rig nodes, nest the groups, and choose whether a parent that is off hides only its children's checkboxes or their widgets too.

    Visibility Groups

  • A visual Widget Editor

    Lay the MC's widgets over a snapshot of your character: position, scale, handle shape, colour, labels, guides — and drag the grid's own inner lines to shape the lattice.

    Widget Editor

  • Presets that travel

    Save a whole configuration — structure, widget layout, targets, sides, drivers, look-ats, groups — and apply it to the next character of the same type, with a dry-run preview before anything changes.

    Presets

  • Compose & Unroll

    Compose stamps the whole configuration onto the MC in one pass. Unroll goes the other way — baking the poses stored in a composed MC back out as timeline keyframes.

    Compose

How it works

Build the rig controls · layers knobs · targets Pose in Harmony Camera View, real tools F6 tags the frame Add behaviour drivers · constraints look-at · groups Compose one runtime script into the MC node Re-open the composed MC any time — ORC reads its own state back and you keep editing Unroll bake the MC's poses back out as timeline keyframes

Where to start

  • New to ORC?

    Read Concepts & Vocabulary first — it is the twenty minutes that make everything else obvious — then follow the sidebar top to bottom.

  • Prefer video?

    The 36-lesson course is ordered by complexity, from a first Master Controller to production presets and heavy rigs.

  • Just installing?

    Installation, then Quick Start for the shortest complete round trip.