Image exporter setup and tools

Our studio relies a lot on Photoshop. Almost all the art in the game at some point either passes Photoshop or is created inside it entirely. We realized quickly we would need a solid pipeline to make sure we could export fast, easy and intuitive. And so the jolly exporter was born!

 
After we mapped out all the options we wanted and needed for the exporter we needed a place to store the settings since we don't want to set these settings each time we export. I thought about creating a meta file, but that's just felt like a lot of overhead not to mention missing meta files, files moved but not the meta etc. What I landed on is storing it in the file info, the keywords which is described as: "An unordered array of descriptive phrases or keywords that specify the topic of the content of the resource" But like my man Art Evans said in Die Hard 2:

So who says that radio signal has to just beep?

The beauty of it is I can store anything in there and retrieve it with the keywords() command.

I won't bore you with all the options and features, just the highlights:

• The option to mirror the layer set to folders when exporting an image
  
  
  
  
  

 

• This is only for layer sets, but if the selected layer set contains a art layer named "crop_guideLayer" the image will be cropped to the bounds of that layer. If it's not present, the image will be cropped by transparent pixels.
• Initial scale setting based on file naming convention. A file named file_200pct.psd will automatically be set to 50%. It's also possible to have a single layer or layerset export inside your PSD file a specific size by giving it the suffix @###pct 
• Naming suffix or prefix based on custom settings, filename or layer parent.