Baking textures part 2

In Baking textures part 1 I talked about getting the baked maps from Maya. But these are mostly just black and white maps, so we want to use Photoshop to edit and export them. But the challenge is to keep it flexible! Although Photoshop has some great non-destructive tools, I haven't figured out how to use a linked layer's luminance as a mask like you would a clipping mask (After Effects does have this option for layers. So Adobe, if you're reading this please add it to Photoshop along with the guide layer option from After Effects for smart objects 😂) Let's get to it!

The setup we came up with looks like this:

Now, this is a bit of work to set up, so that's where our Photoshop script comes in. It creates the whole base setup seen above based on the files the user selects to link.

After we link in all the files we baked out, we create a folder for them and copy the linked file into a mask on a solid layer. I keep the linked files in there, but they don't have to be. It's mainly to tell you if there has been an update.

You're thinking: "that's all fine and dandy Mark, but doesn't using the linked files as a mask make it destructive?" Yes, but we lock the layer to prevent the user from painting in the mask and the color of the AO, shadows and Luminance is controlled by the layerstyle of the colorOverlay parent. Any paint work that needs to be done to add in or delete parts of the texture can be added on the main folder's mask as well as the ability to change the transparency.

And now you're thinking: "But Mark, what if you update the bakes files, won't there be a mismatch between the baked file and the mask on the solid layer?" Yes, there will be, so when you fire up the tool you get the option to either create a new file or update:

Update just updates the linked files into the mask leaving all other settings untouched. Doing it like this gives us a lot of control and speed, since some of the baked maps are rendered out multiple times. Below is a video of the script in action