Urgent UI workflow help needed for work

Artist_in_a_box

Hi guys, kind of in need of some urgent help. If anyone can offer some advice I would appreciate it. I am working in a small studio and am the only artist. I am working on some UI for use in our project in Ogre and have hit a wall. I have never done any ui stuff at all so this is entirely new to me. The coder has asked me for a number of assets which I have provided and animated but he has asked for them split up into separate files so they can be modularly swapped out for other things.

I can do this but am stuck as to how I am supposed to view the project as a whole and make creative changes when all my different elements are split up? e.g : I have a button which is part of a list mounted on a larger frame. The button is one file, the frame another and the animation for the button entering and exiting the screen is done with nodes in yet another file.

We do not have any editor or anything like UDK which I am used to working as everything I do is manually inserted by the coder and and I cant find much online to suggest a workflow.

Can anyone give me some ideas as to how this is done in a larger studio as obviously I am not the first to hit this issue and at the moment I am pretty stuck with deadlines creeping up.

Thanks for any help.

(P.S : I am currently going through the wiki page)

Artist_in_a_box

Oh sorry I forgot to clarify. The UI will be done in 3D so I am making my stuff in max so there isn't an image in 2D, just some textures projected on planes as well as full 3D buttons. The issue I have is that I cant preview the whole thing as I would in UDK because we have no real time view port. The coder is an industry vet and has been doing this stuff for a while, just that as a small studio we have no tools in place and no funding to develop them so we are shoe horning at the moment.


I think one of my issues here is that I havent worked like this with other people before so maybe I'm just not used to working this way.

cptSwing

Using OgreMax and OgreMeshy, will that suffice for previewing? Obviously no interaction there, and I probably misunderstood the question