Octo Vector Bridge¶
Octo Vector Bridge (OVB) is the missing link between your 2D and 3D line art and Toon Boom Harmony. It turns Blender line art (Grease Pencil or Pencil+), Maya Pencil+, rendered passes, and any SVG or raster image into native Harmony drawings — editable vector pencil lines with their variable width preserved, bitmap layers straight from your render, hidden lines culled, and everything dropped into a clean, rig-ready node graph.
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3D line art → 2D pencils
Blender (Grease Pencil or Pencil+) and Maya (Pencil+) strokes become Harmony vector pencil lines you can edit like you drew them by hand — camera-accurate, frame by frame.
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One Structure, both ways
Author a tree of drawings → art layers → passes in Blender or Maya; the Harmony importer reads it back as the same tree. Vector and bitmap passes side by side, in one drawing.
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Bitmap passes
A render pass, a compositor node, a Materials render, a Pencil+ line as PNG — bitmap tracks written by the same export, into the same folders, next to the lines.
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Variable width, preserved
Pressure and taper survive the trip. What you see in the WYSIWYG preview is exactly what lands in Harmony — no flat, lifeless imports.
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Occlusion
Strokes hidden behind solid meshes are culled at the camera — automatically, per layer — the one thing Blender's native exporter can't do.
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Raster tracer built in
Image-Trace-style bitmap → vector in Colour, Greyscale, or Black-&-White, powered by the bundled Potrace engine — or keep the picture as one flat bitmap.
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Weight-paint brushes
Relax, Simplify, and Pressure brushes let you clean and shape your lines inside the tool before they ever reach Harmony.
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Palettes
Import into any scene palette, or a new one; create and rename colours right in the drawing's card — they become real on Apply, and existing colours are reused, never duplicated.
One bridge, three DCCs¶
OVB spans Blender, Maya, and Harmony. One licence covers all three on your machine.
| Source | What OVB reads | What lands in Harmony |
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| Blender — Grease Pencil | the GP strokes directly → SVG with real per-point pressure | vector pencil lines — true variable width |
| Blender / Maya — Pencil+ | Pencil+'s rendered line art (raster + EPS) → reconstructed width | vector pencil lines — the Pencil+ look, hybrid width |
| Blender — Render Pass / Compositor · Maya — Materials | a rendered PNG sequence, per pass or per node | bitmap layers, next to the lines, in the same drawing |
| Any SVG / raster | Illustrator, Inkscape, PNG/JPG sequences, single frames | vector, traced vector, or a flat bitmap |
Everything meets in the Harmony import window, where you preview, tune thickness, clean points, choose art layers and palettes, and build the node hierarchy before a single stroke is written.
New here? Start with the basics
Read Installation, then Interface Overview for a tour of the window and its icons, then Importing to bring your first artwork in.
Where to go next¶
- Interface Overview — the Inspector, Previewer, and Outliner at a glance, and what every icon means.
- Structure & Subartlayers — the tree both exporters author and the importer reads.
- Blender Exporter — Grease Pencil, Pencil+, Render Pass and Compositor in one panel.
- Maya Exporter — Pencil+ lines and Materials renders.
- Stroke Thickness & Pressure — the WYSIWYG width model.
- Video Tutorials — short, step-by-step walkthroughs.