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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 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.