Photoshop Layer Comps

Lt_Commander

A little background: Layer Comps in Photoshop allow you to store and switch between visibility, position, and layer styles in a single document, they essentially act as intermediate save states. If you disable position, you can quickly iterate and modify elements in, say, your diffuse, and the changes made to the element will propagate to the rest of the texture maps automatically. (Think moving/changing text on a decal that effects the diffuse and roughness.) Action Script can reference and switch between layer comps by name and there's a built in save script to export comps as separate documents - as long as you maintain a proper naming convention, you can automate a ton of stuff pretty easily. File sizes stay small as well since it's only one PSD, and most of your maps are stored a few actions, instead of as duplicate layers.

My side panel looks something like this usually - a minimal number of layers with enough layer comps to get the job done. 



I'm a layer comp guy (when I'm not using Substance/Quixel nowadays), but I noticed that every time someone mentions them, it's always a bit of a surprise to at least a few people that they exist, which is weird considering how great they are for a texturing workflow.

I'm mostly curious - for non layer comp guys, is there a reason why making folders/groups for submaps so much more popular? Is it a studio pipeline thing? Is it a lack of exposure to the layer comps feature? Something else?

For those of you using layer comps, do you have any workflow optimizing tips to share?

Sajeet

For me its mainly i had no clue what layer comp was. Looks really neat!