Hey,
For a long time I've been thinking it would be nice to make
available
some of the tools in my
workflow to the greater director community. Unfortunattely
the (large)
amount of time it takes
to transform something that I and my art guys can work with,
to
something that is clearly obvious
for everybody, and doesn't have any scripterrors if you push
some button
the wrong way has
so far stopped me from releasing any of it.
Thinking about it some more this morning, I figured better
something
small than nothing, so here's
what I call a "photoshop exporter", that I've been
using for the past
year orso that I could not possibly
live without anymore.
It tries to solve a problem with a frequently used
workflow:
1) Artist makes funky interface.psd
2) Director programmer tries to import trough photocaster
3) all layer effects, some text, and funky photoshop
features did not
import correctly.
4) programmer tells artist to flatten all that stuff.
artist flattens.
5) programmer imports, all is fine.
weeks later...
6) a few changes need to be made to the interface.
7) artist has to go back to the old unflattened version,
make the changes
8) flatten everything again, in _exactly the same way_.
This exporter removes the requirement to flatten and remove
all layer
effects etc before photocastering something into director.
What it does is it saves the current psd file, with a
_exported.psd
postfix. Then it takes all layersets that do not have any
sublayersets,
and it flattens each of those down into a layer. The new
layername will
take on the name of the old layerset.
Now the workflow becomes:
1) artist makes interface.psd
2) artist organizes it nicely into one layerset per what the
directorguy
wants to see as 1 castmember.
3) artist clicks export.
4) director guy photocasters in.
weeks later.
5) change gets made to interface.psd
6) run export again
7) run photocaster again.
So it's very far from rocket science, but it enables you to
keep your
artwork at a "source level" so it makes it very
easy
to change stuff, and integrate those changes into your
build.
Personally, I prefer to have one cast per photoshop file
that I
import, so when I re-import an updated version of that
photoshop file, I
can just copypaste over the old members, and have
the whole update cycle take around a second or 20, which is
at least to
me, a hell of a lot faster than how I used to do it before.
You'll find the script here, it will appear in Photoshop (I
think you'll
need CS2) under File->Scripts->MergeAllLeafGroups.
You need to place it here: C:Program FilesAdobeAdobe
Photoshop
CS2PresetsScripts
Hopefully this will save somebody else some time as well.
You'll find the script here: http:/
/mach8.nl/various/MergeAllLeafGroups.jsx
Bye, Lucas
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