Blu-ray Tutorial 4: Using After Effects to Create Animated Buttons with Designer
The fourth tutorial is here. In this tutorial I go over using After Effects and Photoshop to create animated buttons for Blu-ray HDMV. The menus we create are pretty simple, but using these procedures you can come up with very nice looking menus.
Tutorial five will be on using my Flash HDMV viewer to preview your menus for quality control and client approvals.Â
I hope you enjoy it and find it useful!
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If you are having trouble viewing the video, please read *A Note About  Flash
June 4th, 2008 at 6:46 am
Hello, thanxxx for the good Tutorial!!!
Can i made button slices without the PS script? I have problems with the Designer…The Slices are not correctly to the button … We can i change this without the PS Script… Thanxx
June 4th, 2008 at 8:03 am
You can design he PSD without the button slices, but it’s going to take you a while. You basically have to make the PSD look exactly the same, but without using any of the scripts. It’s very time consuming and I don’t recommend it. If you send me your PSD that you are having trouble with maybe I can see why slicing isn’t working for you. It might be because of how you sliced it or something.
July 3rd, 2008 at 3:27 pm
Nice website!!
January 29th, 2009 at 4:35 am
Hi Ray,
Just watched your video, and I’m going to forward it on to our artists (I’m the author and they should be doing it!).
I had to say though, if you name the slices with the slice tool (Ctrl-double-click them) then that halves your renaming after you run the ‘Slices to Designer’ script.
If you do that, you can modify the ‘Slices to Designer’ script to better order the slices (and remove extraneous states not needed for un-named slices)
January 29th, 2009 at 9:04 am
Hi Nathan,
Thanks for the comments. This tutorial was actually made before Designer 2.5 was out, which is why I was renaming things the way I was. You are absolutely right about how to do it with the new version.
I like your suggestion on modifying the script. I’ll have to look into it. I’ve actually thought about completely re-writing it using some of the new Flash tools (Switchboard, PatchPanel) to try to really streamline the designing process. But I just never got around to it.
Good luck with your projects!
February 2nd, 2009 at 4:09 am
Rey, send me an email and I’ll send you my modified script (I dont know about the license so I shouldn’t just post it here!)
I was really disappointed with the DesignerPS process, putting a lot of pain on the designer. I’ve got 90% of the way through a Fireworks process (its slices are better, and it has a convenient ‘page’ metaphor!), but I’ve shelved it for now as debugging it was horrendous. Now I’ve noticed the layer-sets in photoshop, I might write my own ’slice-sets’ and see how that goes.