Is there a way to automatically render individual layers?

[nemanson]

Is there a way (via script or otherwise) to automatically render individual layers or groups of layers to PNG sequences?  For example, characterRightArm, characterLeftArm, characterShirt, etc, for each animation.  Right now I manually turn on and off layers for each render and animation, which is very time consuming.  Coming from After Effects, I would usually write a script for this.

[oksamurai · Accepted solution]

Sadly CH doesn't have any external scripting capabilities (yet). Cycle layers is the best we have for now for image sequences. Are you rendering these out individually and bringing them into AE? Just wondering what the workflow is for needing to render them out separately as opposed to the whole character.

[nemanson]

Thanks for replying!  I love your tutorial series by the way.  I'm coming from AE and was able to integrate CH into my pipeline really quickly using your vids. 

Basically I'm using CH to render sprites and animations for video games - hence needing specific layers (for changing out costumes, etc). I have a lot of head and body turns so CH has been great for that.  I have a master puppet that I copy all of my layers into (as smart layers so I don't have to rename them) in Photoshop.  Right now I have each set of render layers in a switch trigger group (hat, no hat or right arm, no arm) along with an empty layer, so I turn those switch triggers on and off in the timeline depending on what I need to render and essentially just go down a list turning things on and off.  Then I export to PNG sequence and drop files into Unity.  This has actually been about 6 to 10 times as fast as working in after effects with duik or puppet pins, especially being able to reuse animations.  But I'm always looking to improve the flow so any advice would be much appreciated 🙂 

[oksamurai]

Ah that sounds amazing! Yeah, unfortunately I don't think we have a great workflow for that kind of thing yet, but I'm hopeful more people will do what you're doing in the future and give us a reason to prioritize it! Or maybe I just need to finally learn Unity...

[nemanson]

This morning I started using layer picker and it is improving the flow quite a bit.  Just had to reconfigure the master puppet structure a bit.  It's a lot easier to use the sliders vs having to click into each take and change each trigger's switch group, for every layer.  Still working out those general puppet kinks but I like it so far!  

[oksamurai]

Ah yes, layer picker - the most powerful and most underutitlized behavior we have - that's a really smart idea!

[nemanson]

Got everything worked out, it's much faster!  It only takes me about 45 minutes to render an entire sprite with all animation variations, which is crazy because in AE and Duik it used to take me about 3 days!  

[oksamurai]

Awesome. Please keep me posted, would love to see how the game finally turns out (and play it)!

[nemanson]

For sure!  I'm about a month out from finishing, thanks again for the help! 🙂