Illustrator to Photoshop

Okay I made the mistake of doing all the basic shape construction for an interface i'm playing around with in illustrator, assuming that upon completeing the basic stuff i could just drop my vector based image into photoshop masks and then bring it to life with photoshop.

What i didn't count on was the lack of communication these two programs seem to have. in other words it always rasterizes the entire image, and when i import with layers enabled it gives me 4 retarded layers that have incredably long names of all the groups and paths that were crushed into it.

I understand that i could make paths for each individual object and then fill make layer masks and all that nonsense the real question though is, how can i do that without spending 6 years going through the 100 or so paths that make up this image. Please tell me there is some way, or some program like the reverse version of Streamline...

thanks in advance.

Working with Illustrator 10 and Photoshop 7, I just copy from Ill(edit/copy or ctrl-c) and paste into PS(edit/paste or ctrl-v). When I do, it gives me the option of pasting the clipboard as pixels, a path, or as a shape layer.

only problem i have with that is the shear number of object shapes that i have to deal with, copying pasting and repoistioning all of them is something i'd like to avoid if i can

Wow! You must have a lot of objects.

The only thing I know to do is select groups of objects and then seperate them later, in PS.

Yeah, I'm like DM, how many objects are we talking about here? The only thing that I could suggest is combining some of the pieces that you don't need to do as much work too to shrink down the amount of manipulation that you have tp do. I don't work a lot in illustrator (although I have a copy gathering dust on my hard drive) but I'm sure that theres a way to combine lesser elements into larger pieces without totally ruining the image like you describe photoshop as doing.

Anyways, hope that halps at least a bit.