Saved Scene preview or thumbnail before opening
Griffin Avid
Posts: 3,764
This might be another dead horse issue, but I would love to have a preview of any file Daz is about to open.
Now that I'm saving so much work, it's getting tedious to guess what's in a scene exactly before opening it.
So I've got "Candice_Dres_Arm_weap_pose_bike_backgrnd_dome+guy_full_swing1.duf" and eventually windows doesn't I even show the full name of the file without a rollover. I could explore a neater system of abbreviations for scene details or--
it would be awesome if Daz saved a thumbnail or preview file for every scene you save so you can see what it is before you open it.
I am spoiled by photoshop that lets me see a mini shot of any native file. I sometimes even wish in photoshop there was a jpeg alternate that regular windows could see. That'd be nice as a "Save As" feature.
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So is there a way to get a preview image? My scenes are saved looking like the clapperboard from a movie with a light blue border. (if I remember correctly)
And since I save often, I find myself opening the wrong version.
Any ideas or info about this?
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Comments
DS should save a 91 pixel thumbnail - are you not seeing that? It's only |OpenGL, however, so may lack surface features.
There actually is a pane you can add to the interface that displays your saved scenes; I usually have it attached to the main viewport so I can switch between them any time.
No, this is what I get when I use FILE/OPEN and pick a previously saved Scene.
Also, long as I got you.
I moved the My CONTENT folder from the C drive to another drive.
I went into Daz and changed all the paths and all my previous content is available in the library.
When I go to Install Manager (I also updated all its paths) it shows all my available files to download, but the installed files now shows Zero as if nothing was ever installed.
The reason I'm tinkering is that I downloaded a group of products and used the Internal Daz installer to install them. It's the INSTALL tab above the Smart Content Tab inside the Daz program itself.
When I restarted Daz and such, one of the new products is not shown AT ALL. I went to the Install Manager and picked the Download + Install option and it did and the product then showed up in the Smart Content area.
That got me to thinking that maybe all is not right with my Library and possibly- a lot of my 'library' ISN'T showing up in Daz after all. So I started downloading and re-installing all my products using the Install Manager.
I feel like that should cover all my purchases and make sure everything I own shows up in Daz.
What do you think? Good idea?
-- and what reconnects the Install Manager to the current state of installed/Available etc.....
P.S. I also moved the install manager main folder, but re-linked it.
The folders have the same name....and paths..so......?
Thanks for any help.
Ah, I see what you're talking about. Unfortunately, you're not going to have Windows display a thumbnail of the contents of the scene file because it doesn't know how to display the contents.
The Smart Content and Install panes both rely on the Content Managment System, to which Install Manager writes (and from which it reads for things like hiding Connect Installed items - I suspect that your missing item was Connect Installed, so not showing in DIM, but that the folder it was in was no longer mapped).
DIM tracks its own installations via the files in the Manifests folder - the UI doesn't give a way to change the location of that, but it can be doen by editing the account.ini file in the Install Manager AppData folder or by a directory junction in the OS.
I'm in that account ini, but I only see two references (that I've been changing to no avail) and see no where the reference to the manifests folder.
I installed a new item as a test and it created its own folder and says I only installed 1 item total. So I'm looking for where specifically do I have to link to the onld manifests folder that lists all my previous downloads and installs.
DownloadPath=E:/My Daz 3D Manager_Studio/DAZ 3D/InstallManager/Downloads
CurInstallPath=E:/My DAZ 3D Library
Software64Path=C:/Program Files
Software32Path=C:/Program Files (x86)
AND___________
[InstallPaths]
size=1
1\InstallPathTitle=E Drive My Daz 3d Library
1\InstallPath=E:/My DAZ 3D Library
You should have an entry
OverrideManifestDir=
you want to put the path there, using / as the folder separator
But also need to update the indiidual manifest files so they have the right install path. To do that you need a text editor that can do a batch 'Find and Replace'.
@Jestmart: I hope you're wrong. That would suck. Although I do have a text batch editor....
So far we got some improvement.
611 installed.
185 Ready to download.
0 Ready to install.
So the bigger question is, is it possible to have files lost in the gap between the Daz Install Manager and the Internal connect Installer?
So....should I (re) download + install those 185 products? Just to be sure?
it actually should be possible
iClone displays thumbnails in windows explorer of all its content, I assume there is some sort of icon file for each project, product, etc file somewhere windows can see, defined in properties maybe in a folder in app data or program data etc honestly not looked but it should be possible to code such a function into DAZ studio saves capturing the openGL viewport too.
I don't suppose one can edit the properties of an induvidual file manually changing the icon though
As I understood it, he wants to see an actual representation of the scene as a thumbnail, rather than the default icons for files that Windows displays which are stored within the DAZ Studio executable file.
Yes. That's why it's a product suggestion and not an OS fix.
This is what Photoshop does.
Regular windows can see all sorts of picture formats. But not .PSD (Photoshop Document save format)
But! Photoshop opens a preview window. That would be great for Daz to do too - so that you can ....see your ...scenes.
Basically see ANYTHING you were about to work with...not even sure if IMPORT could do this for the various formats or sources....
As I said initially, DAZ does have an available tab for precisely this function for DAZ Studio Scene files, but it's not enabled by default nor is it associated with the Windows File dialogs.
and that was what I was saying iClone does
so it is doable as the information for the icon must be in the file or elsewhere
properties gives me no hints
Because the iClone development team has "customized" the default Windows (and probably the Mac OS X, because I believe it also runs on that) file open and save dialog boxes. Adobe does it with Photoshop and the GIMP developers have done it with that too. DAZ probably doesn't place a high priority on that sort of thing when they have already included a way to view the scene files inside the application.
DS should save a 91 pixel thumbnail - are you not seeing that? It's only |OpenGL, however, so may lack surface features.
Yes windows does this from the regular, internal explorer browser.
I'll either keep a browser window open as a second librarian, use the SAVED SCENES pane or adopt my music system and name+number each scene in a series
DAZ doesn't do it simply because its not needed; you can open saved scenes from within the content library pane which does show the OpenGL preview version.