Interface Overview¶
The Harmony import window is where everything meets — you preview artwork, tune it, choose where it lands, and build the node hierarchy, all before a single stroke is written to your scene.
- Inspector — every setting for the selected item: the drawing's identity, mode and palette; subartlayers, art layer & sequence, offset/scale, stroke thickness, tip taper; a peg's transform. It changes shape depending on whether you've selected a drawing, an art layer, a structural node, or a raster track.
- Previewer — a WYSIWYG canvas. What you see here is exactly what OVB writes to Harmony: the same width model, the same points, the same colours.
- Outliner — the tree of drawings and structural nodes (pegs, groups, composites) you're about to build. Selection here drives the Inspector and the Previewer.
- Preferences (⚙) & Help (?) — the gear opens global preferences and shortcuts; the
?opens help. - Frame bar & display toggles — scrub the sequence, set the onion-skin range, and toggle grid / snapping / points / background.
- Apply / Cancel — the master Merge split lines toggle sits here too. Apply writes everything to Harmony; nothing touches your scene until then. Checkpoint save (opt-in) saves the scene every 100 frames of a long import so Harmony can release the drawings already written; it unlocks once the scene has been saved on disk, and hovering it says what it does.
The three panels¶
The left panel is contextual — it shows the settings for whatever you selected in the Outliner:
- Select a drawing → its name and target node, start / range, Mode (Art Layers or Original Bitmap), Bypass, and the Palette with its colours.
- Select an art layer → subartlayers, sequence, transform, stroke thickness, tip taper, points.
- Tick Peg / Group / Composite on a drawing → their own sections.
- A raster track swaps in the trace controls.
See Inspector.
The centre panel renders the current frame exactly as Harmony will. It carries the frame scrubber, onion skin (with red/green ghosts for behind/ahead), a field grid, snapping, a points overlay (anchors + pressure points), and background presets (dark / grey / white).
See Previewer.
The right panel is the tree you're assembling. Drawings hold their four art layers (Overlay, Line Art, Colour Art, Underlay); structural nodes nest to form a rig-ready hierarchy with sibling aggregation. Double-click empty space to import.
See Outliner & Hierarchy.
The icons¶
OVB uses one icon vocabulary in all three places it draws a tree — the Blender and Maya Structure trees and the Harmony Outliner — so a row reads the same wherever you meet it.
What a row is¶
| Icon | Meaning |
|---|---|
 |
Drawing — a folder on disk, a Read node in Harmony. Dimmed while it has no bound art. |
 |
Overlay art layer (OL) — on top |
 |
Line Art (LA) |
 |
Colour Art (CA) |
 |
Underlay (UL) — at the back. An art layer's icon is dimmed while the layer is empty, and struck through when the drawing's mode leaves it out. |
 |
Vector track / pass — SVG or PDF in, editable pencil lines out |
 |
Bitmap track / pass — PNG (or any raster) in, a bitmap layer out (or traced to vector, if you ask) |
What a node emits¶
A drawing can carry a Peg, a Group and a Composite around it, or be a pure container with no Read at all. The icon is composed from the parts that are on, in the order the network is wired — so the icon of a row is the node stack it becomes on Apply:
| Icon | Reads as |
|---|---|
 |
Drawing alone — a Read node |
 |
Peg — a transform |
 |
Group — a wrapper |
 |
Composite — merges its children |
 |
Peg → Drawing |
 |
Group → Drawing |
 |
Drawing → Composite |
 |
Peg → Drawing → Composite |
 |
Group → Drawing → Composite |
 |
Peg → Group → Drawing (Group Order: Parent — the peg drives the group) |
 |
Group → Peg → Drawing (Group Order: Child — the peg lives inside the group) |
 |
Peg → Group → Drawing → Composite |
 |
Group → Peg → Drawing → Composite |
  … |
the same tokens without a Drawing — a pure container (peg + group, group + composite, …) |
The colour is the token: green peg, grey group, blue drawing, purple composite. The same composed icon heads the drawing's card in the Inspector.
Try it¶
Tick what the drawing emits and see the icon the tree will show, the node chain it becomes, and how the linked names read.
It follows the same rule as the tool's own icon factory — the same tokens, the same order, the same files — so it cannot show an icon the Outliner would not.
Toolbars¶
| Icon | Where | What it does |
|---|---|---|
 |
Outliner | Magnify — frame the selected drawing's node in Harmony's Node View |
  |
Inspector | Link / unlink names — keep the drawing, peg, group and composite names in step (name, name-P, name-G, name-C) |
 |
Previewer | Onion skin — ghosts of the frames behind (red) and ahead (green) |
  |
Previewer | Field grid and snapping |
  |
Previewer | Points overlay — anchors, and the pressure keys that reach Harmony |
    |
Previewer | the Relax, Simplify, Pressure and Thickness brushes |
  |
Inspector | Apply to the drawing's other art layers / to a frame range — copy this track's settings across |
Nothing is written until Apply
The whole window is a staging area. You can import, re-order, retune, and undo freely; only Apply commits the result to your Harmony scene — including growing the scene length if your sequence needs more frames than the scene currently has.