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Octo Transform Sync

Octo Transform Sync (OTS) moves rigs, animation, and cameras between Toon Boom Harmony, Blender, and Autodesk Maya — pegs ↔ bones ↔ joints — in all six directions. No live link, no FBX, no plug-in chain: two small files you export from one application and rebuild in another, with the hierarchy, the rest pose, the bezier tangents, and the camera lens intact.

▶Video tutorial — coming soon

  • Six routes, one tool

    Harmony ↔ Blender, Harmony ↔ Maya, and Blender ↔ Maya. Every file declares its own coordinate space, so any writer can talk to any reader — no source-specific paths, no "supported direction" asterisks.

  • One file rebuilds the rig

    A .anm carries each peg's parent and rest pose alongside the keyframes. Create Rig builds the skeleton and applies the animation from that single file — the .pvt is only for setup and recovery.

  • Multi-rig

    An editable Rig column splits a scene into separate rigs — one armature in Blender, one group in Maya, one node group in Harmony. Connectivity is locked: merge loose roots, never split a connected chain.

  • Multi-camera

    Every camera in the scene travels with its FOV, near/far clip, offset, roll, and default-camera flag — rebuilt attached to the peg that animates it.

  • Tangents survive

    Absolute per-axis bezier handles, plus LINEAR and CONSTANT. Your curves arrive as curves, not as a baked step ladder.

  • Axis & unit conversion

    Z-up ↔ Y-up and metres ↔ centimetres resolved at the edges, with rotation converted by quaternion conjugation — the maths that keeps a turn from turning wrong.

Two files, one job each

OTS is not a real-time bridge. It writes two small JSON documents that you move between applications like any other asset.

File Holds Use it for
.pvt — Pivot The rest skeleton: name, parent, pivot, rest rotation Rig setup, rebuilding a lost skeleton, recovery
.anm — Animation Per-frame position / rotation / scale, interpolation, bezier handles — plus each peg's folded-in rest pose and the cameras The everyday transfer. Self-sufficient

If you only learn one thing

Use .anm. It contains everything a .pvt does and the animation, so a single .anm can build a rig from nothing and animate it in one click. Reach for .pvt when you want the skeleton without the shot.

See Pivot Files (.pvt) and Animation Files (.anm).

The six routes

From ↓ / To → Harmony Blender Maya
Harmony — ✅ ✅
Blender ✅ — ✅
Maya ✅ ✅ —

Both formats work on every route. This is not an accident of testing: no reader in OTS contains source-specific code. Every writer stamps a coordinate_system header describing its own space, and every reader converts through a single canonical space on the way in. Adding a route is adding a space, not a code path.

See Transfer Routes.

How a transfer goes

  1. Select the pegs, bones, or joints you want in the source application — and the cameras, if any.
  2. Scan them into the export list. The Rig column proposes a grouping; correct it if you disagree.
  3. Export a .anm (or a .pvt) to disk.
  4. In the target application, Browse to that file. OTS matches every incoming item against the scene and shows you the result — amber means no match.
  5. Apply onto what already exists, or Create Rig / Create Cameras to build it from the file.

Nothing is written to your scene until you press one of those buttons, and everything they write is a single undo step.

Where to go next