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Changelog

v1.0.0

The first public release of Octo Rig Composer.

The rig

  • Controls — a turnaround holder with a Front and a Back face, plus Share Sides, so a back face reuses the front's extreme columns instead of authoring them twice.
  • Pose layers that key across their control, with L/R pairs, pages and per-target sides down to individual deform curves.
  • Knobs — any pose layer can become an extra axis for another. A layer's dimensions stack to six with a control in the chain and four fully global — a budget enforced at every gate (the Knob picker, the drag, Make Global, Move to…); drivers and look-at fields reach eight. A layer that adopts a knob keeps its existing poses at position 0.
  • Global layers that compose head-less, and full control exclusivity so a two-head rig never bleeds into itself.

Authoring

  • Frames-first capture — pose with Harmony's own tools and press F6; ORC records the frame, not a delta, and reads the rig live at Compose time. Editing a pose later and re-composing just works.
  • F6 / F7 dispatch on what the mouse hovers, and follow your Harmony keyframe bindings.
  • Auto-capture that stamps the frame as you move onto empty snaps, and refuses when it would overwrite work.
  • Excel-style autofill on grids, with Alt to count down, Shift for a whole-grid count and Ctrl to hold a value; Fill Grid and Fill Dimensions for the bulk cases.
  • Copy / Paste Grid and Copy / Paste Sides, both refusing with a stated reason rather than pasting partially.
  • A History panel on Photoshop's model — one timeline, click any entry to jump there.

Behaviours

  • Drivers — checkbox, combo slider, continuous slider and 2-D pad, driving attributes, drawing substitutions, node enable and deformer visibility. Global or keyed per snap, with multi-attribute mappings and release/hold influence.
  • Drivers can drive other drivers and look-at fields, same-kind only, and gate constraints.
  • Constraints — Copy and Lock, via Harmony-native column sharing rather than expressions, with per-channel control and a checkbox-driver gate.
  • Look-At with two fully independent modes: Tracked Pegs for irises and Deform Follow for lids and skin — multi-pair, with convergence, squash, per-curve weights, chain-aware bulge, and every field keyable and driver-linkable.
  • Visibility Groups that nest, with Cascade and Override modes, node hiding, and auto-prune of empty groups at Compose.

Interface

  • A three-column window: Outliner, Editor and Navigator, where a node's place in the tree is its key domain.
  • Three Outliner display modes — Dimensions, Visibility and Flat — plus type and role filters.
  • Pinned navigators, so you can watch a control's grid while authoring three levels down.
  • A Widget Editor that renders each widget exactly as Harmony draws it: snapshots, guides, snapping, folders, box and handle gizmos, and draggable inner grid lines.
  • Consistent visual grammar — one green for "keyed", greying with a reason instead of hiding, and two-click confirmations that fire only when there is something to lose.
  • Divergence marks — import or re-open a rig and yellow tracks everything that changed since: exact and per page on the authoring grid, owned by the selected layer on the navigators, and deletions included — an emptied snap the reference has a frame for keeps the yellow ring, so it never reads like a cell the import always had empty.
  • Every yellow has an inverse: Restore Reference, on the right-click of each surface, puts the baseline back over exactly what that mark covers — deleted poses resurrected, one undo step, a counted status line.
  • Every node moves from its right-click menu: Move to… is the drag's twin — controls re-parent, pose layers and knobs become an axis — for pose layers, extra knobs, drivers (controls + layers + knobs) and look-ats alike, every target wearing the outliner's dual glyph. A control's menu imports an MC straight into a named face slot.

Output

  • Compose — the whole rig into one Master Controller, inside a single Harmony undo step, with an incremental cache that makes re-composes fast and your pose restored whatever happens.
  • Unroll — poses back onto the timeline, including merging a front and a back MC into one pass, which Harmony's own unroll cannot do.
  • Re-edit — reopen a composed MC and get your whole rig back: layers, keys, targets, drivers, look-ats, groups and your workspace.

Toon Boom MCs

ORC works with Master Controllers it did not build. A plain Harmony MC can be imported as a pose layer with its states as frames, unrolled from Toon Boom's own state manager, and restyled in the standalone Widget Editor — reading the style attributes that MC actually declares, and leaving it native.

Presets

  • Config presets — a rig template with its layout, groups and magnet keywords, reusable across a cast, with seven shipped shapes.
  • Pose presets — nine independently saveable sections, with a dry-run preview before anything is applied.
  • Grid presets — one layer's shape, spacing and frames, reading Harmony's own .gridPreset and .cubePreset files alongside ORC's.
  • Applying a preset onto a rig that already has work reconciles it, asking per control before replacing anything.

Practicalities

  • 30-day trial, then a machine-bound perpetual licence with return and recovery; one activation covers every host the product ships in.
  • Optional Octo Skip Nodes integration — a Skip column on target lists, tagged at Compose.
  • Configurable shortcuts, with keying and navigation bindings read from your own Harmony configuration.
  • Session autosave with a restore offer on the next launch.

Fixes — build 5cf356d (2026-09-15)

  • Several MCs in one scene turned into the same MC after reopening the scene or importing a template — the state files are named after the tab (Head.tbState, orc_pose_data.json…), and every MC was composed into the same scripts/ folder, so the last Compose overwrote the others. Each MC now gets its own folder, scripts/<group>/<MC name>/ — the group is part of it because two groups can each hold an MC with the same name. MCs composed with an earlier build that share a folder have to be recomposed from their saved ORC session; re-editing them from the MC would load the last one's authoring.
  • A template keeps the MC re-editable — the re-edit data (orc_pose_data.json, orc_session_state.json) is now in the MC's Files to Copy, so it travels with the template. An ORC MC whose data is missing stops with a message saying which file to copy, instead of importing as a native MC.
  • Licence: Activation limit reached on a machine that was already activated — the machine id included the network adapter, so switching Wi-Fi, Ethernet or VPN made the same computer look new. It now uses the system's own machine id (Windows MachineGuid, macOS hardware UUID). An existing licence file is healed once, online, with no new activation.

Fixes — build b79313d (2026-09-03)

  • Two copies of the same rig in one scene — the same template imported twice, or a copied group, had the second MC driving the first prop. Node paths in the state files and the manifest are now relative to the MC's parent group (Harmony's own ~ convention), so each MC drives its own copy. Nodes outside the MC's group stay absolute — keep the MC inside the rig's group.
  • Installer — the shared Octo Tools toolbar in Harmony is rebuilt from every installed tool, so uninstalling one tool no longer removes the others' buttons; Blender add-ons are enabled automatically after install; downloads are named by release id (1.0.0-<id>) and the installer window shows the same id.

Known limitations

  • The Side Naming preferences are saved but not yet read: side labels are fixed at L / R with a - separator, L first.
  • An MC composed before ORC moved its data to disk cannot be re-opened for editing — recompose it once with this version.