Contact : Diego Garcia Huerta
Implementation of a shotgun engine for Toon Boom Harmony. It supports the classic bootstrap startup methodology and integrates with Toon Boom Harmony adding a new Shotgun Toolbar and a new menu under Windows->Shotgun menu.
- Engine Installation
- Configuring your project for Shotgun Toolkit
- Modifying the toolkit configuration files to add this engine and related apps
- Modifying the Templates
- Configuring Toon Boom Harmony in the software launcher
- Caching and downloading the engine into disk
- Toon Boom Harmony engine should be ready to use
- Configuring the Shotgun Toolbar within Toon Boom Harmony
- Toolkit Apps Included
With the engine, hooks for most of the standard tk applications are provided:
- tk-multi-workfiles2
- tk-multi-snapshot
- tk-multi-loader2
- tk-multi-publish2
- tk-multi-breakdown
- tk-multi-setframerange
Disclaimer
This engine has been developed and tested in Windows 10 using Toon Boom Harmony version 16.0.0. It requires 16.0.0 or above due to new features introduced in this version.
The engine has not been used in production before so use it at your own risk. Also keep in mind that some of the hooks provided might need to be adapted to your workflows and pipelines. If you use it in production, I would love to hear about it, drop me a message in the contact link at the beginning of this documentation.
When I started using shotgun toolkit, I found quite challenging figuring out how to install and configure a new tk application or a new engine. Shotgun Software provides extensive documentation on how to do this, but I used to get lost in details, specially with so many configuration files to modify.
If you are familiar with how to setup an engine and apps, you might want to skip the rest of this document, just make sure to check the templates and additions to the configs that might give you a good start.
If you are new to shotgun, I also recommend to read at least the following shotgun articles, so you get familiar with how the configuration files are setup, and the terminology used:
Here are detailed instructions on how to make this engine work assuming you use a standard shotgun toolkit installation and have downloaded shotgun desktop. Shotgun Desktop Download Instructions
Also an amazing resource to look for help when configuring your engine, is the Shotgun Community Forums, specifically under Pipeline Integrations category.
Finally, this link contains the technical reference for Shotgun toolkit and related technologies, a great effort to collate all the tech documentation in a single place: Shotgun's Developer Documentation
If you haven't done it yet, make sure you have gone through the basic steps to configure your project to use shotgun toolkit, this can be done in shotgun desktop app, by:
-
enter into the project clicking it's icon
-
click on the user icon to show more options (bottom right)
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click on Advanced project setup
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Select a configuration: "Shotgun Default" or pick an existing porject that you have already setup pages and filters for.
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Select a Shotgun Configuration: select "default" which will download the standard templates from shotgun. (this documentation is written assuming you have this configuration)
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Define Storages: Make sure you name your first storage "primary", and a choose a primary folder where all the 'jobs' publishes will be stored, in this case "D:\demo\jobs" for illustrative purposes.
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Project Folder Name: This is the name of the project in disk. You might have some sort of naming convention for project that you might follow, or leave as it is. (My advice is that you do not include spaces in the name)
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Select Deployment: Choose "Centralized Setup". This will be the location of the configuration files (that we will be modifying later). For example, you could place the specific configuration for a project (in this example called game_config) within a folder called "configs" at the same level then the jobs folder, something like:
├───jobs
└───configs
└───game_config
├───cache
├───config
│ ├───core
│ │ ├───hooks
│ │ └───schema
│ ├───env
│ │ └───includes
│ │ └───settings
│ ├───hooks
│ │ └───tk-multi-launchapp
│ ├───icons
│ └───tk-metadata
└───install
├───apps
├───core
├───engines
└───frameworks(Note that this might not be suitable for more complex setups, like distributed configurations)
Every pipeline configuration has got different environments where you can configure apps accordingly. (for example you might want different apps depending if you are at an asset context or a shot context. The configured environments really depend on your projects requirements. While project, asset, asset_step, sequence, shot, shot_step, site are the standard ones, it is not uncommon to have a sequence_step environment or use a episode based environment either.
I've included a folder called 'config' in this repository where you can find the additions to each of the environments and configuration yml files that come with the default shotgun toolkit configuration repository (as of writing)
These yaml files provided should be merged with the original ones as they won't work on their own.
As an example, for the location of the engine, we use a git descriptor that allows up to track the code from a git repository. This allows easy updates, whenever a new version is released. So in the example above, you should modify the file:
.../game_config/config/env/includes/engine_locations.yml
and add the following changes from this file: engine_locations.yml
# Toon Boom Harmony
engines.tk-harmony.location:
type: git
path: https://github.com/diegogarciahuerta/tk-harmony.git
version: v1.0.0Do not forget to update the version of the engine to the latest one. You can check here which one is the latest version
In your environments you should add tk-harmony yml file, for example in the asset_step yml file:
/configs/game_config/env/asset_step.yml
Let's add the include at the beginning of the file, in the 'includes' section:
- ./includes/settings/tk-harmony.ymlNow we add a new entry under the engines section, that will include all the information for our Toon Boom Harmony application:
tk-harmony: "@settings.tk-harmony.asset_step"And so on.
Finally, do not forget to copy the additional tk-harmony.yml into your settings folder.
The additions to config/core/templates.yml are provided also under the config directory of this repository, specifically:
In order for our application to show up in the shotgun launcher, we need to add it to our list of software that is valid for this project.
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Navigate to your shotgun url, ie.
example.shotgunstudio.com, and once logged in, clink in the Shotgun Settings menu, the arrow at the top right of the webpage, close to your user picture. -
Click in the Software menu
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We will create a new entry for Toon Boom Harmony, called "Toon Boom Harmony" and whose description was conveniently copy and pasted from Wikipedia.
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We now sould specify the engine this software will use. "tk-harmony"
- Note that you can restrict this application to certain projects by specifying the project under the projects column. If no projects are specified this application will show up for all the projects that have this engine in their configuration files.
If you want more information on how to configure software launches, here is the detailed documentation from shotgun. Configuring software launches
One last step is to cache the engine and apps from the configuration files into disk. Shotgun provides a tank command for this. Tank Advanced Commands
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Open a console and navigate to your pipeline configuration folder, where you will find a
tankortank.batfile. (in our case we placed the pipeline configuration underD:\demo\configs\game_config) -
type
tank cache_apps, and press enter. Shotgun Toolkit will start revising the changes we have done to the configuration yml files and downloading what is requires.
Note that this step is also required when you update to a newer version of the engine.
If we now go back and forth from our project in shotgun desktop ( < arrow top left if you are already within a project ), we should be able to see Toon Boom Harmony as an application to launch.
Make sure to show the Shotgun Toolbar to be able to access the shotgun menu as shown below:
This application forms the basis for file management in the Shotgun Pipeline Toolkit. It lets you jump around quickly between your various Shotgun entities and gets you started working quickly. No path needs to be specified as the application manages that behind the scenes. The application helps you manage your working files inside a Work Area and makes it easy to share your work with others.
Due to the way Harmony works, newer versions of the workfile are kept under the same directory, ie. the following working file versions:
bunny_010_0010.v001.xstage
bunny_010_0010.v002.xstage
...
bunny_010_0010.v009.xstage
would be located under the same directory and their resources are shared (images, audio files, etc... ), similar as if you were to Save As New Version functionality from Harmony.
Basic have been implemented for this tk-app to work. open, save, save_as, reset, and current_path are the scene operations implemented.
"New file" creates a new project from a template. This template can be changed to your own by adding the following to the tk-multi-worfiles2 YAML settings file. Make sure you use forward slash to specify the location of the .xstage file to avoid potential issues:
# here you can specify your own template project for when "new file" is
# pressed in the workfiles interface. Make sure you name the project "template"
template_project_folder: C:/pipeline/config/templates/harmony/newfile/template.xstage
Check the configurations included for more details: additions to the configs
Note for developers:
Harmony actually does not provide a good way to programatically "save as" a project so a few tricks are done under the hood to copy the relevant files if the context is changed. (when you save to a different context you are, ie. from "clean" task to "colour" task).
A Shotgun Snapshot is a quick incremental backup that lets you version and manage increments of your work without sharing it with anyone else. Take a Snapshot, add a description and a thumbnail, and you create a point in time to which you can always go back to at a later point and restore. This is useful if you are making big changes and want to make sure you have a backup of previous versions of your scene.
is provided to be able to use this tk-app, similar to workfiles2.
As it happens with tk-multi-workfiles2 versioning, the snapshots only contain the .xstage file, so they are not a self contained project.
The Shotgun Loader lets you quickly overview and browse the files that you have published to Shotgun. A searchable tree view navigation system makes it easy to quickly get to the task, shot or asset that you are looking for and once there the loader shows a thumbnail based overview of all the publishes for that item. Through configurable hooks you can then easily reference or import a publish into your current scene.
for this tk app supports loading 3d models, drawings, movies and sounds. The configuration uses the following PublishedFile types but you can easily add your own as long as it is mapped to one of these actions [3d, movie, drawing, sound]:
- Alembic Cache: [3d]
- FBX File: [3d]
- OBJ File: [3d]
- 3DS File: [3d]
- OBS File: [3d]
- Movie File: [movie]
- Image: [drawing]
- Texture: [drawing]
- Rendered Image: [drawing]
- Photoshop Image: [drawing]
- WAV File: [sound]
- Sound File: [sound]
- Audio File: [sound]
For example, if we wanted to add a PublishedFileType "Sketch File" that represents an image of some sort within the pipeline, we could do it this way:
- Sketch File: [drawing]
The Publish app allows artists to publish their work so that it can be used by artists downstream. It supports traditional publishing workflows within the artist’s content creation software as well as stand-alone publishing of any file on disk. When working in content creation software and using the basic Shotgun integration, the app will automatically discover and display items for the artist to publish. For more sophisticated production needs, studios can write custom publish plugins to drive artist workflows.
The basic publishing of the current session is provided as for this app.
The result of publishing is a self contained Harmony project with all the resources needed to load it back. Not that only the relevant .xstage file is included, discarding the other potential wip versions in the same folder.
The Scene Breakdown App shows you a list of items you have loaded (referenced) in your scene and tells you which ones are out of date. From this overview, you can select multiple objects and click the update button which will update all your selected items to use the latest published version.
is provided to display the current elements that were loaded through the tk-multi-loader2 app.
Note that are the moment there is not an update mechanism in place, it only indicates what is contained in the project that was loaded through the tk-multi-loader2 app. If anyone have any good ideas how to go about it, I'm all ears.
This is a simple yet useful app that syncs your current file with the latest frame range in Shotgun for the associated shot. If a change to the cut has come in from editorial, quickly and safely update the scene you are working on using this app. Towards the end, it will display a UI with information about what got changed.
is provided to set the frame range within Harmony for a shot_step environment. In Harmony, everything seems to start at frame 1 so we are just adjusting the duration to fit the range and setting start and the stop frame.
Please adjust this logic accordingly to however you want to handle frame ranges in your pipeline.
For completion, I've kept the original README from shotgun, that include very valuable links:
This repository is a part of the Shotgun Pipeline Toolkit.
- For more information about this app and for release notes, see the wiki section.
- For general information and documentation, click here: https://support.shotgunsoftware.com/entries/95441257
- For information about Shotgun in general, click here: http://www.shotgunsoftware.com/toolkit
All the apps that are part of our standard app suite are pushed to our App Store. This is where you typically go if you want to install an app into a project you are working on. For an overview of all the Apps and Engines in the Toolkit App Store, click here: https://support.shotgunsoftware.com/entries/95441247.
Don't hesitate to contact us! You can find us on support@shotgunsoftware.com