Export — Harmony to SVG, PDF, AI¶
Octo Vector Bridge is a bridge in both directions. The importer brings vector art into Harmony; Export takes the vector art of a drawing out — as SVG, PDF or AI — with the four art layers, the exact per-point thickness and the real colours.
It has its own button on the Octo Tools toolbar, right beside the importer: Octo Vector Bridge — Exporter.
Why it exists¶
Harmony has no vector export a studio can use. The Write node's PDF flattens every line to one width, drops transparency, exports only Line Art and Colour Art, and turns black with any effect or rig in the network. utransform lists no SVG at all, and its PDF comes out blank.
Export reads the drawing itself through Drawing.query.getData, not the render. So it is immune to rigs, cutters and effects by construction, it sees all four art layers, and a pencil line arrives with the thickness it was drawn with.
The window¶
- Drawings to export — a tree of Read nodes, with the four art layers as children of each drawing. It opens already filled with the nodes selected in the Node View. The + button in the list header adds more — From Node View selection or any Read node From scene… — and − removes the selected drawing. The Frames column says how many frames the node exposes, and, on each art layer, how many of them hold vector.
- Frames — All exposed (every frame the node shows a drawing on), Current frame, or a Range.
- Art layers — checked per drawing, under it in the tree: Overlay, Line Art, Colour Art, Underlay. Two kinds of row are greyed out with the reason in the Frames column: bitmap when the node's own art-layer toggle is set to Bitmap (Export writes vector only, so the layer would export nothing), and empty when a Vector layer has no artwork on any exposed frame. An empty layer is never called bitmap.
- Output — the folder, the format, the layout, and Crop to content. Skip empty exposures is on by default: an exposure that holds no artwork on the art layer writes no file. Turn it off to write an empty file for it and keep the numbering continuous.
Formats¶
| Format | Keeps per-point thickness? | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| SVG | yes, as data-widths |
the round-trip format: OVB re-imports it with the pressure intact |
| no — one width per line | Harmony's exact fills, colours and alpha; opens anywhere | |
| AI | no — one width per line | the PDF bytes with Illustrator's extension (.ai has been a PDF container since Illustrator 9); opens in Illustrator with the paths editable |
PDF and AI have no variable-width stroke in the format itself, so the window shows a standing note while either is chosen. If you need the pressure to draw outside OVB, convert the lines to filled outlines in your vector editor — the geometry and the thickness data are there.
Gradient fills come through in all three formats: SVG as <linearGradient>/<radialGradient> definitions, PDF and AI as real shadings. The handle you placed in Harmony is the geometry.
Bitmap formats¶
Export is not only a vector door. Any vector art layer can be written as pixels instead, in the format the Harmony pipeline actually reads: TGA, PNG, JPG or TIF.
| Format | Transparency | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| TGA | yes | what the Harmony pipeline writes; the safest choice for a round-trip |
| PNG | yes | lossless, opens everywhere, the default |
| TIF | yes | lossless, for work leaving Harmony |
| JPG | no | lossy, and art on an empty background lands on a white one |
JPG carries a standing note while it is chosen, for the same reason PDF does: it is the one format that changes the image.
Bitmap comes out of the vector, drawn at the document's own size. It is not a render: no camera, no effects, no composite. If you want the rendered picture, that is what Harmony's Write node is for.
An art layer that is in Bitmap mode on the node exports as bitmap only: there is no vector in it to read, so its Output toggle is locked to bitmap.
Vector or bitmap, per art layer¶
Each art layer has an Output toggle in the third column of the tree: vector or bitmap, with the same two glyphs the importer and Octo Scene Assembler use. Which file that becomes is decided once, in the Output card: Vector Format for SVG, PDF or AI, and Bitmap Format for TGA, PNG, JPG or TIF. It is the same model as the Blender and Maya exporters, so you learn it once.
A Bitmap-mode art layer has its toggle locked to bitmap. Choosing Single file, grouped disables the toggles, because a grouped file is one vector document; bitmap rows stay out of it, and their tooltip says so.
Bitmap output is rendered at the scene resolution and clipped to the camera frame: art outside the camera does not export. The Bitmap Format combo says this on hover, so the fact sits where the choice is made.
Layout¶
- Separate files per art layer —
<node>/<OL|LA|CA|UL>/0001.svg. The same folders the OVB importer reads, so an export re-imports in place with each art layer on its own layer. - Single file, art layers as groups —
<node>/0001.svgwith a<g id="UL">,<g id="CA">,<g id="LA">,<g id="OL">in paint order. The shape a website or Illustrator wants.
Crop to content¶
Off, the file's viewBox is the camera field, exactly what the importer expects — an export re-imports where it was. On, the viewBox tightens to the artwork plus a margin: no field-sized whitespace around an icon. Cropping changes the viewBox and nothing else; the coordinates in the file are identical either way.
Round-trip¶
Export to Separate files, uncropped, into a folder; open the importer, add that folder as a drawing. Fills come back as fills, pencil lines as pencil lines with their pressure, each art layer on its own layer. The reader that makes this possible is the same one the importer uses to pull existing art from a node, and it is tested to round-trip exactly.
Long sequences
Export walks frame by frame and can be cancelled between frames. A drawing exposed on several frames is read once and written once per frame, so the importer's frame indexing survives.