Has it already been done, and if not is it a feasible idea?
Each blender layer would have its own photoshop layer, so you can render them all at the same time and then tweak the psd file at the end.
Would save a hell of a lot of time in creating layered images that almost all commercial illustration requires.
Maybe you could choose to have groups or objects as individual layers?
I’ve not tried this myself, so I can’t say for sure if it works, but I think that Blender supports layered EXR documents (not sure how you trigger this, maybe render layers?). Then you could open them up in PS and it will use the layers.
Again, not worked with this directly, so someone who knows more about this please feel free to jump in!
Blender can’t read PSD’s any more, so I doubt it could write them either.
Just use an multi-layered exr image, or if that doesn’t work use render layers and output nodes, that way you’ll get a file dump each time you render, so you can do small tweaks and keep each output in sync.
as far as i know, PSD is an adobe source-closed format, which can only be read from 3rd party software.
Open-EXR should be the way, but i’ve never tried it myself either
Being able to write all of the render layers directly to an XCF file or TIFF would be really nice.
It is possible with multi-layered EXR (I think) but I’m not sure if it’s any good with other packages.
Krita nor Gimp can open Blender EXR files.
The Blender Foundation was instrumental in helping to develop the Multilayer exr format. Blender can read MultiLayerEXR files, and just happens to have a node compositor you could tweak them with.
thanks for the comments guys.
will give this exr a try…