In the first installment of our series on migrating from After Effects to Combustion, we looked at converting Illustrator artwork into Combustion Paint objects, a process which, for some of our readers, may very well have fallen somewhere between paper cut and root canal on the pain scale. This time we're going to go a little easier on you, as we explore how well Combustion works with native Photoshop files.
For those of you used to the After Effects workflow (which I hope you are; after all, you are the target audience for this series), you're probably quite aware of the incredible flexibility that using native Photoshop files gives you when building motion graphics projects in AE, a process which one might think Combustion can't even begin to match (what with it not being an Adobe product and all). However, there's a lot of good news to report here. Fundamentally, Combustion works almost identically to After Effects with respect to how it handles PSD files, so let's dive right in and see what's what.[an error occurred while processing this directive]Combustion+PSD=Almost as good as After Effects
If you're like me, almost every motion graphics or compositing project starts with at least a little Photoshop work. Whether you're trying out some composition ideas to see how they work as a still frame or just preparing some raster images for the trip over to AE, chances are Photoshop is an early stop along the line. I've also gotten quite used to bringing entire native Photoshop documents directly into AE, having plenty of options for how to import them, and also having some flexibility with what to do with them once they're in there. Suffice it to say that I was expecting something akin to the process of bringing Illustrator artwork when dealing with PSD files in Combustion, but I was pleasantly surprised. What I'm about to demonstrate isn't a true tutorial per se, so you'll probably get the gist of things just fine without explicitly repeating what I'm doing in Combustion. However, I'm going to be using the Watermark.psd file that comes in the Tutorials folder on the Combustion 2 install CD in case you feel like following along anyway.
Let's take the Watermark file and go through bringing the image into both After Effects and Combustion. In AE, I have to select Import, choose whether I wanted the image brought in as Footage or as a Composition (fig. 1), and then decide if I want the a single layer from the image image imported or the entire thing brought in with all of its layers merged together (fig. 2).
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| Figure 1 |
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| Figure 2 |
Now to Combustion's version of the same process. Again, I have to select Import, choose the PSD file in Combustion's wack-wack-wacky file picker, at which point I'll be confronted with an Import Options box (fig. 3).
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| Figure 3 |
I'm presented with three choices: Merged Image, Grouped, and Nested. In spite of the obvious interface differences, these three options can fairly approximate the After Effects import process. What Merged Image does should be fairly apparent. Grouped imports each individual layer into the selected comp, aligns the layers exactly as they were in the original image, and assigns a null object layer to control the entire group (fig. 4). Nested takes the Grouped option one step further by enclosing all the layers into a parent composition (fig. 5).
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| Figure 4 |
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| Figure 5 |
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