vTools: Scripts for Photoshop
polycounter lvl 18
vTools: Scripts for Photoshop
A set of scripts I've knocked up over the last year. My employers have agreed that the scripts belong to me, and not the company I work for as I wrote them on my own time, so even though I wrote many of them to help me at work I can now release them to be of help to you... whenever.
The scripts include:
vSavePSDTGA - a script designed to facilitate the saving of a PSD source image and a TGA output image at the same time. Over the last year it's grown to do quite a bit more than that - I find it indespensable at work.
vPlasma - not the most useful script 99% of the time, but if you really need a semi random effect, al-la the clouds filter, but in colour, this should give you a lot of options.
vUVWHelper - Creates one of those natty UVW helper grid with some variables (images sze, grid size). I use this one a lot.
vHexMagnet - Makes semi random hexagonal grids, but woth real hexagons, and distorted hexagons that can tile outside the bounds of a square (Real hexagons do not make for good game ready tiling textures)
Comments are appreciated, but I guess this is less of a pimp and preview than it is just something you might find useful.
UPDATE: CS3 versions of the scripts now available. I'll be discontinuing CS2 support in almost all cases now as ballencing the differences between the two versions could get ugly.
A set of scripts I've knocked up over the last year. My employers have agreed that the scripts belong to me, and not the company I work for as I wrote them on my own time, so even though I wrote many of them to help me at work I can now release them to be of help to you... whenever.
The scripts include:
vSavePSDTGA - a script designed to facilitate the saving of a PSD source image and a TGA output image at the same time. Over the last year it's grown to do quite a bit more than that - I find it indespensable at work.
vPlasma - not the most useful script 99% of the time, but if you really need a semi random effect, al-la the clouds filter, but in colour, this should give you a lot of options.
vUVWHelper - Creates one of those natty UVW helper grid with some variables (images sze, grid size). I use this one a lot.
vHexMagnet - Makes semi random hexagonal grids, but woth real hexagons, and distorted hexagons that can tile outside the bounds of a square (Real hexagons do not make for good game ready tiling textures)
Comments are appreciated, but I guess this is less of a pimp and preview than it is just something you might find useful.
UPDATE: CS3 versions of the scripts now available. I'll be discontinuing CS2 support in almost all cases now as ballencing the differences between the two versions could get ugly.
Replies
roolie - which version of Photoshop are you running? CS2 and above should include the plugin at installation.
thanks anyway for sharing
Anyways, this is very cool and useful, thanks for sharing!
fogmann - yep, that's pretty much word for word what the SavePSDTGA script does. the functions for making the actual things happen are actually fairly simple - the tricky part *more long winded than tricky) is the handling of all the preference information, since it comes from 2 locations and has to be sorted based on precidence while keeping all of them available for access at any time. There are still somethings I may add to it though. Every time I think "ah, it's done" I'll come up with something else it can potentially do
Anyway, thanks for checking it out - feel free to pass it around (the whole thing, not just one script) if you feel it might benefit other people.
Thanks again buddy.
Josh
- "vTools were Designed for, Created and Tested in Photoshop CS2 running on a Windows platform. The scripts may work on other platforms, or in CS3, but this is by no means certain."
And these are nothing to do with Volition, other than that I work there (part of the stipulation for releasing them was that I made no claim that Volition or THQ endorsed or supported these scripts, although a lot of the artists there use them). I kept the 'v' as it means all the scripts end up in the scripts menu in the same place, and I'm just used to looking for it in a list...
Diminished' - Just occured to me you work for StreamLine, that explains why you know of vTools for Max. Neat.
Couple of things I might modify to the script myself (doesn't look too complicated) - an option when saving TGAs, to suffix the appended layer set name with a _ (your default settings only seem to allow using a _ when only using the initial of the layer set name). Minor thing
Also, it seems like the script automatically saves the TGAs with RLE compression, which I can't see an option to disable or change anywhere. It also seems to enable the "RLE compression" checkbox by default when just saving a regular TGA from any other file after using the script. This is something I'd like to avoid - any idea on how I could change that within the script, or maybe add an option for it?
Again though, many thanks for posting these.
thanks!
Something else I noticed is that if you tell it to save only marked channels with alpha, it still gives all other outputted sets a blank white alpha channel, when I'd expect it to save those as 24-bit and only use 32-bit for the ones it finds marked. I might have a look at that to see if I can get it working, unless that was something you wanted to do (or if I'm just not using it correctly, do tell!)
Do you mind if I hack this script around a bit to pare it down to the settings I use the most? At the moment there's a lot of stuff in there which I would never use.
Anyways, many thanks again for releasing all of this, I love it
If it's saving out at 32 bit on sets it's not supposed to then it's either a bug, or something you'e doing - I'll take a look after dinner to verify which it is, and if it's your doing how it's occuring
You can hack it up all you want MoP
/EDIT - so I did some poking around, and the alpha issue was entirely my fault. I'd made an assumption when I last added some Alpha functionality in there and the assumption was wholly incorrect - but since I was testing the new features for problems and not the old ones I didn't notice the result. Stupid of me. I fixed it, and added a compression checkbox while I was at it so you can turn that on and off as well as making some small tweaks to some of the other scripts and adding a new one (not much use to 99% of people I suspect). I'll try to get them up tomorrow if I can (too tired right now), but I make no promises.
-Justin
Sorry for the delay - turned out my fix for one problem caused another, so I fixed that too - plus a minor issue I hadn't noticed before but did while trying to figure this out
Are you still at Volition?
Cheers!
For example, I have two marked layer sets, ~_d and ~_local ... I have one alpha channel called _d (I assume this is the correct name by reading the Help files), but when I save using the script, it adds the _d alpha channel to both the filename_d.tga and filename_local.tga
Ideally it'd just save it into the marked set and not the other one too.
Also, when I choose this option, whenever it saves a file I get a dialog popup saying "TEST 1:3" - I found that line in the script so I can disable it, but I can't figure out how to get the alpha saving working correctly.
Any ideas?
Cheers,
-MoP
By "latest" I mean grab whichever version matches your version of Photoshop, rather than grab the new CS3 versions if you're running CS2.
I know for sure I fixed the TEST 1:3 line, not so sure about the alpha thing, and I don't have time to check it until tonight, by which time you'll have verified it yourself
Edit: Just checked again on a different computer and got the vTools_1-1.zip from your site, the vSavePSDTGA.jsx definitely has this line in it:
alert("TEST 1: "+chanlength);
Which I assume brings up the TEST 1:3 dialog. Maybe you uploaded the wrong version?
Keep me posted on how it goes MoP. I'm not doing any more updates for CS2 now, unless there's a specific glitch that needs fixing - so if you find one let me know.
Well thanks for digging this out tremulant! Would be a shame to miss that one.
Does anyone have this tools? As the website is down.
Sorry/Thanks!
However I wonder if anyone knows if the files are actually hosted somewhere by the original author. I would like to point people to this tool in a video tutorial but cannot really do so if it just isn't available anywhere. (and I wouldn't feel confortable hosting the file for people to download either, since there is probably a reason behind the fact that the author turned off his website ...)
Harl ! Help !
Here is a download link for those interested. I can't promise it will be there forever, but I doubt I'll be deleting it anytime soon. (needless to say, if a link to the original author turns up I'll replace this link with one directing to his site)
*link removed, look below*
You can snag them from https://db.tt/tZzPSBp1
You can also snag the brushes I've been using for years for texturing and painting from https://db.tt/Zpmz2Voo
Hope that helps!
The reason I've not supported them for a long time is because work thought it was a good idea, and rolled their own proprietary version (better integration with the other tools that way).
I didn't realise it was so popular, or I might have kept on it
Glad it's of use. I'll try and ensure it remains available, but if someone wants to expand it or do their own version I'm more than happy for you to take chunks of my (amateur and outdated) code, or if you want to host it somewhere, have at it. A credit would be nice if you do though - ego likes stroking on occasion
Thanks HarlequiN and S6
Still works like a charm!
When I select "Associated with marked sets" option. It just saves alpha with every map because only marked sets get saved.
Thanks !
I believe I had to set something in Keyboard Shortcuts ... but I don't know what exactly should I do. Help :<
pior
I think you have right, there missing something.