Using Bridge as Remote Job Server

[benl13565393]

I'm looking to automate part of our art pipeline. In particular, processing files for usage in a game. In the ideal situation, the processing (or "job") would be done by invoking it either command line. The command-line would either directly run the script or package the details of the job and then make an API call to a "Remote Job Server".

I've looked around to see what is possible with the Adobe products. There seems like no fantastic solution.

Parts of our pipeline use Photoshop, Illustrator, and Flash. I've experimented and found that at least with Photoshop, using it command-line does not work well. This leads me either making a plug-in or script which acts as a server to run the job. Which would then possible mean that Illustrator and Flash would need the same.

The art director asked whether bridge could be used to dispatch the jobs to the desired app, since I believe that Bridge can be used to run a script on one of the apps.

Are there any recommendations on a good approach to handle this? The ideal goal is to have minimal "human interaction" and to have jobs be invoked remotely by command-line or through a server.

Thanks!

[Stephen_A_Marsh]

Depending on what is required, you may at least be able to remove Photoshop from the pipeline:

Re: Photoshop droplet on server?

[benl13565393]

Thanks for the link. I don't believe Droplets are the solution since it seems like you have to manually invoke them. Some of the other details within that link are interesting. But it nevertheless seems to paint the picture that there isn't really a clean way to do this. The best idea there that I see is the guy who talked about running Ps 24/7 watching a particular directory. This is doable, but I was hoping for something a little cleaner and more extensible.

Let me see if I can better explain how the pipeline would work. Part of the goal here is to reduce the knowledge/steps an artist needs to have in order to do their job. Part of the motivation here is so we don't have to keep teaching people steps. Moreover, many of the artist we use are contractors. So they most definitely have different versions of Photoshop.

Part of our pipeline involves taking 2D artwork done in photoshop and vectorizing them. What we have found, from experimentation, is that we get the best results (based on the style of art) if we have the 2D artists build line art in a group and then color it in another group. We then take that PSD, export the layers, and then image trace each resulting PNG in Illustrator.

Realistically, the only part an artist needs to "touch" is creating the line art and the colors. The rest can be sent through an automated pipeline.

The flow would be

Artist -> submit to us -> we "submit" to job server -> server does the rest -> we examine output

Or in theory, the artist could just submit and we could have another script or server submit to the actual job server.

Flow-wise during automation I would imagine it would be something like:

invoke script/call through server -> script/server runs layer to png -> completion triggers new script/call through server -> script/server runs image trace

To do date, we've been doing it manually. No scripts, droplets, or any automation. This has been costly with time, so now we are looking to automate as much as possible because there are not only a lot of files, but there are times those files get updated several times in short spans of time. So all those touch points add up in time.

Hope this explains it better.