organization

[salp42]

I want to make a neighbor hood and i'm using different layers for the windows, doors, garage,etc. After i finished the first house i had about 10 layers. If i make like 20 more houses i am going to be very confused with the layers. So is there anything that you can do to make it more organized? Like maybe folders with the layers in it?

[slowtiger]

Of course, that's the way to go.

A bit of planning saves a lot of work. Think of which elements will be repeated. These you create first, then duplicate them. I don't know about your neighbourhood, but in mine most of the windows have the same shape and size. The same goes for most houses, they just have different colours.

A possible workflow would be to create 1 folder (group layer (or bone layer for non-pro users)) with these contents:

house group layer
- window layer
- door layer
- wall layer

Once created, I duplicate this group layer, go inside and just change the colour of the walls. Voila, instant neighbourhood.

This concept cpould be extended further, for example with a window group layer:

window group layer
- window frame
- curtains
- room interior
- mask

This way I could have each window as a separate group, so I could have different animation behind each window, people popping up, lights switched on, and so forth.

Hm. This sounds like a nice project to play with ...

[salp42]

yea I use the same shapes and I'm gonna just copy the houses an chang the colors. I might add a few points to the houses to make them a little different. Thanks I'm gonna use the bone layer because I have the free and I don't think you can have group layers.

[slowtiger]

I just tried my own recipe, the result is here:
http://www.slowtiger.de/examples/fenster.html

[salp42]

nice job! I'm making a more urban area for my upcomming cartoon series (I got a long way to go) I like the color of the windows and the people walking by.

[slowtiger]

I've noticed that this setup needs much time to render because of the many layers. (4 x 16 x 5 = 320)

Next time I'll put 16 windows in one layer and place extra window folders on top only where really something happens.

[heyvern]

I was going to suggest copying and pasting shapes from many layers into one layer. Unless you absolutely need multiple layers for layer ordering during the animation having multiple layers isn't needed.

If you need to animate shapes with in a layer than maybe those can be on their own layer or you can name the point groups so they can be selected for animation or bind those points to bones so they can be easily animated.

Those buildings in my mind could be on one layer and use bones to animate windows and such. Multiple layers is handy though.

-vern

[slowtiger]

It also depends wether this scene is a one-shot, or wether I want to re-use the buildings in several scenes. For a one-shot I don't care much about arranging stuff efficiently for fast rendering, in worst case I could put it on my second machine ...

For re-using stuff efficient rigging is worth the trouble.

[studiojer]

I've been doing some similar experiments with natural props to build scenes...I've got models I'm using for trees, bushes, etc. (admittedly, its a pretty limited library) that I'm importing into groups and using to assemble new scenes. Its amazing what you can get away with if you just scale, flip, and stick a couple of lighting affects in your scene.

I'll post an example of what I'm talking about this weekend if I can break out of my loop of "assemble, render, scream, select all, delete".

[ngh903]

When I have to put things in group folders (which is a problem because I don't have AS Pro), I open one of the backgrounds they have loaded on. Then I delete all the layers inside of it, then drag my layers into it and name it a different name.