This is my second post here. As with my first, I couldn’t decide whether I should put this in Help, in Scripts & Extensions, or in Development, so I apologize if it’s in the wrong place.
In my other post asking for scripting help, I asked for help in setting up a system that would allow me to assign tags to layers, and then toggle the visibility of every layer with a specified tag with a single button press. This second feature I want to script for myself is related but separate: I would like to make it so that if I show a layer with some tag, it hides all the other layers with that same tag.
For example, if I’m making a character, and I’m making various shirts for them, I would like to be able to tag every shirt layer with the shirt tag. Then, if I show a shirt layer, it will automatically hide all the other shirt layers. (I wouldn’t necessarily want it to do that all the time, maybe only if I’m holding some modifier key while I show the layer.)
In order to do this, I need to be able to detect when a layer’s visibility has changed. I know that there are the beforecommand
and aftercommand
events I can use with the app.command.LayerVisibility
command, but this only comes into play when I use that specific command, either with its hotkey or with the Layer > Visible menu item, and it can only affect the current layer. I would like this feature to be able to come into effect when any layer’s visibility is toggled in any way, in particular via the hide/show button on the Timeline.
The specific help I’m looking for here is, I’d like help in determining when a layer’s visibility has changed, and which layer it was. If we had some kind of layerWasHidden
and layerWasShown
events that I could just listen to, then this would be a breeze, but I don’t think we have that. (Or, if we do, I can’t find it anywhere.) So, one approach that comes to mind is just to keep a table of every layer and its visibility, and have a function that scans through all the layers and compares each one’s current visibility to what I have stored in the table. If it’s now visible but it wasn’t before, then call my LayerWasShown function, and vice versa for the LayerWasHidden function. After I do this for all the layers, I replace the data in the table with their current values. Then I just do this process periodically, say several times a second. I think this approach would work, but it might be a pain, and it certainly wouldn’t be the most elegant solution if something else exists that’s closer to the event-based approach I was hoping for.
Thanks in advance for any insight and advice!
P.S. side note: in my other post, the idea I was talking about doesn’t have any kind of exclusivity to the tags the same way that this idea does. In other words, I might have, for example, an accessory tag that I can use for bracelets, necklaces, etc., and there’s no inherent reason why you shouldn’t be able to see multiple of those at the same time, but then I might have a more specific bracelet tag, and maybe that tag should be exclusive, like maybe you only want to see one bracelet at a time. So I figure, I can specify these tags in different ways, like in the User Data field for a bracelet layer, I could put, tag: clothing, tag: accessory, xtag: bracelet
, where “xtag” means “exclusive tag”, something like that.