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Re-editing a Composed MC

▶Video tutorial — coming soon

A composed Master Controller is not a dead end. ORC writes its whole configuration onto the node, so you can come back tomorrow — or next month — select the MC and keep working.

Everything goes through one gesture: ＋ → Import MC, with the MC selected in Harmony's Node View.

What happens next depends on what you selected.

Re-opening an ORC-composed MC

If the MC was composed by ORC, you get the full re-edit flow, and your rig comes back.

What comes back
Everything you authored Pose layers, grids, keyed frames, targets and their sides, knobs, drivers, constraints, visibility groups, look-ats — including their per-snap keys.
Your workspace Which face was active, the selected node, your pinned navigators, the outliner structure.
The MC name Auto-filled with the node's own name, so re-composing overwrites the same MC by default.
Unroll's target Points at the composed MC, not at whatever source it came from.
A divergence baseline Re-opening records what the MC carries as the reference to compare against, so from that moment on anything you change shows the yellow modified mark.

Yellow tells you what you have touched since you re-opened

ORC does not care whether a rig arrived from a Harmony MC you imported or from an ORC MC you re-opened — importing is a shortcut for not re-authoring what already exists, not a different kind of rig. Either way, the frames it came in with become the reference, and a frame you change afterwards is marked.

That is mostly a safeguard. A stray drag or a mistyped digit leaves a rig that still looks finished — the pose has a frame, the dot is still green — and without a mark the first sign would come after composing, in Harmony. The yellow says "this one moved" while you are still in ORC.

An existing baseline is never overwritten: a layer that came from a Harmony MC keeps pointing at that MC through compose and re-open, so a divergence you have not resolved does not quietly reset itself.

And every yellow has an inverse: right-click the marked snap, grid, navigator position or knob tick and Restore Reference puts the baseline back over exactly what the mark covers — deleted poses included.

The rig you are building for the very first time has nothing to compare against

Any rig that comes back from an MC carries a reference — it makes no difference whether that MC came from Harmony or from your own last compose. Pick it, and the frames it arrives with are what everything is measured against.

The one case with no reference is the first session of a brand-new rig: there is no earlier version of it yet, so nothing is marked and nothing could be. That changes the first time you compose and open it again.

What does not come back

Why
Poses of imported targets Imported targets are stateless by design — their values live on the MC and the timeline.
Live source MCs If the front/back MCs you originally imported are gone from the scene, their slots stay as labels only — and the faces that used them are demoted to native, keeping their frames and composing from them. Nothing is lost; see An imported MC is an accelerator.
Anything from an MC composed by an older ORC See below.

Re-opening replaces your current rig

This is "load this rig", not a merge. If your session already has authored work, ORC asks first:

Re-open Master Controller Re-opening this MC replaces your current rig. Your session has authored poses that aren't part of it — compose or save first to keep them.

The buttons are Cancel (the default) and Replace. A session with nothing authored is replaced silently.

If it is not recognised

An MC composed before ORC moved its data to disk cannot be re-opened, and falls through to the plain-import path instead. The log says so:

not ORC-readable — treating as regular MC. Recompose to enable re-edit.

The fix is to recompose it with the current version.

Importing a plain MC

Select a Master Controller that ORC did not compose — one Toon Boom's own wizard made — and ORC decomposes it into a pose layer.

Five read-only passes, reported as they run: the pose grid, the authored frames, the controlled nodes, their types, then building the layer. Nothing is created in your scene during any of it, and the undo snapshot is only taken once ORC starts changing its own data — so a bail-out never leaves a stray undo step.

What you get
A layer Named uniquely after the MC. A grid MC becomes a grid layer; a slider MC becomes a slider layer, never an "N × 1" grid.
Its frames Decoded per position into the layer's snaps.
Its targets Every controlled node it recognises. For a deform, only the topmost node is kept — the group already exposes its whole chain as one target.
A knob If the MC has more than one layer of poses, ORC creates a separate slider layer named <name>·W and wires it as this layer's knob.
The slider's look A native slider's colours, size, orientation and label are translated so the imported slider is indistinguishable from one you authored.

By default the layer lands as a global free layer. Drag it into a control's Front or Back face to give it a turnaround. You can also import straight into a face by using Set Front → Import MC… on the control.

The success line tells you exactly what happened:

Imported 'robin-mouth-MC' — 7×3, 42 targets, 21 frames + W knob 'robin-mouth-MC·W' (13 pos). Added as a Global free layer — drag it into a Control (Front/Back face) to make it head-ful.

Refusals

Message Meaning
Nothing selected in Node View. Select the MC first.
No MasterController in selection. What you selected is not an MC.
'robin-MC' is already imported — remove it first to re-import. Importing twice would duplicate its targets and double-drive the same nodes.
'robin-MC' has no readable pose grid — is it a TB Slider/Grid MC? ORC could not find a grid in it.

An imported MC is an accelerator, not a dependency

This is the rule worth remembering.

Importing an MC is a shortcut — it saves you building a grid and listing targets by hand. It is not a permanent link, and your rig does not break when it goes away.

If you reopen a rig whose imported MC is no longer in the scene — deleted, renamed, or because you applied the rig to a different character — ORC does not fail. It demotes that face to native: the imported frames are merged into the layer's own frames, the layer stops being "imported", and it composes from its own data.

2 imported MC(s) not found in this scene - composing natively from 528 frame(s)

Your targets are untouched — they were always the layer's own. Navigation still works, because the imported frames stay available for the navigator's badges and jumps.

This is exactly what makes character presets work across a cast.

Duplicating a control

Right-click a control → Duplicate Control:

Mode Copies
Structure only Ctrl+D The faces — grid, widget look, knob, back toggle — with an empty target list. The upper/lower-lid workflow: clone the shape, then re-point it.
Full (layers & targets) Faces, targets, owned pose layers, knobs, drivers and look-ats, with fresh keys and remapped references.

Neither copies poses.

Session restore

ORC autosaves your session while you work. If it was closed mid-edit, the next launch offers it back in the feedback bar:

Saved session found — Front: robin-head-MC   [Restore] [Dismiss]

The offer times out on its own. You can make restore automatic and silent with Auto-restore session on startup in Preferences.

This is separate from re-opening an MC: the session is your unfinished work, the MC is your shipped result.

The round trip

author  ──Compose──▶  an MC in the scene
   ▲                        │
   └──── Import MC ◀────────┘

And for poses you want as keyframes, Unroll takes the third side of that triangle.

Because ORC stores frame references rather than baked poses, this loop is lossless in the way that matters: fix the pose at its frame, re-compose, and the change is picked up.