Part 4½_ Batch Processing in Photoshop_Follow Up Blog_3D Environment Textures
Illustrated Animations for Virtual Reality_Using Adobe After Effects & Autodesk Sketchbook
So this part kind of fits in in platform 4 and 1/2…
— no train smash though;
We first built the environment and then we figured the colour palette. The reason it happened this is is partly because of the process we planned from the start, so we had deadlines to stick to, second, cause animation and environment planning and implementation happened simultaneously. But never the mind — we need to know that in the future the colour palette will be applied before bringing textures into AFX and not after.
Anyhoos, this article is a guide to how we created and applied a colour template to the environment textures using Adobe Photoshop to create the final png file that will be used in the AFX environment as the backdrop to the illustrations aka animations.
How to apply template colour palette to texture —
The Batch command runs an action on a folder of files.
To Batch-process files we have the following options:
- Choose File > Automate > Batch (Photoshop)
- Choose Tools > Photoshop > Batch (Bridge)
To stay inside Photoshop —
You will have to record an action. Go to Window > Actions. There's a button similar to "new layer" in that Action Window. That action will record everything that you are doing in Photoshop.
- press ‘create new action’, press begin recording and voila now you can go ahead and change the colour.
- Press stop recording. After you are done you can batch apply that action using Photoshop’s Batch
- Go to
File > Automate > Batch ...In that window at the top you will find "play" section where you can select which action do you want to apply. - Now choose ‘Action 1’ in the “play” dropdown menu
- After that you select the Source(Folder) and the destination of where you want to save the files after the action has been applied.
- After pressing ‘ok’ PSD will have graded and saved the files where you showed it to.
- Now you can go ahead and save these out.
- First save one file by going to ‘Save As…’ and selecting the PNG option
- Then press done recording once the file has finished saving out.
- Go to Automate, Batch and set files to follow the recorded ‘Saving’ action.
Errors we got and need to look into—
After trying to batch edit one set of textures we came across this error message —
This Issue requires some more work (will ask on Reddit and Stack Overflow and repost answer here again) —
For now we are gonna go with manual grading this set of textures, as we need to finish the prototype, but in order to go ahead and create many more of these environments cost efficiently, we will need to find a way of batch editing all types of textures otherwise we will spend too much time doing the menial task of color correcting all the environment textures to fir the colour palette.
Ideas on how to fix it —
- Found out the one image was somehow in Gray scale mode by default, who knows why, that’s how it got downloaded, so might have something to do with metadata?
- Might also be old version of PSD?
See here for the next blog in this series “Part 5_Illustration Colour Palette”
See here for the full list of blogs in this series:
Illustrated Animations for Virtual Reality using Adobe After Effects & Autodesk Sketchbook
-Intro — Illustrated Animations for Virtual Reality
-Project Phase_Workflow planning:
- Part 1_Sketchbook Setup
- Part 1_Follow Up Blog
- Part 2_Animation Planning
- Part 2_Follow Up Blog
- Part 3_3D VR Environment Setup
- Part 4_3D Environment Textures
- Part 4½_ Batch Processing in Photoshop
- Part 5_Illustration Colour Palette
- Part 5_Follow Up Blog_Illustration Colour Palette
