I'm creating assets for a game using Illustrator. I have created a bunch of shapes, and i want to export each shape in 24 different colours (which i've made swatches of, if that helps)
I was wondering if there's a way of doing this in some kind of batch process? (rather than copy and pasting the symbols a bunch of times and changing the colour then manually saving them)
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1 Answer
If you made swatches which are in each such document, you can use the Actions panel to record an action which has the following effect: select your shape, set the fill (and/or) stroke to your desired swatch and export the file- repeat as many times as there are swatches. This while I am assuming you have a folder full of individual files which have a shape in each one, and each file will produce 24 separate files. After recording the action, use the Batch... command in the fly-out menu of the Actions panel. In case you do not have every one of your swatches in all of the separate documents, you can use a trick to instantly place all the swatches by saving a file with all of your swatches saved as spot-colors displayed as shapes on the artboard, and recording a Place command to place this file as the first step in your batch action. When a file is placed and contains spot color inks, the swatches are instantly added to the current document.
While batching actions can make your work faster, most of the time such work can greatly benefit from custom scripts!
UPDATE: See my article and referenced scripts to use variable data and a re-coloring command system to accomplish your task. Illustrator Variable Data Advanced Techniques: Recoloring Artwork based on data
