Image Thumbnail Viewer

[jbravado]

I had a request from a coworker to produce a UI of an image thumbnail viewer. You'd be able to click the thumbnails and have them map to an environment sphere in the scene.

The thumbnail part has stumped me a bit. Ideally none of the images would get imported into the scene unless the user selects them. Even then, only one at a time would be in the scene.

How do you produce image thumbnails in a UI? The ideal control I've seen is image, however I can't seem to resize them. Considering most of the images are HDR's, the resized view of one of the images in the UI is a small block of color that doesn't represent what the image is. I'd prefer a display similar to a file texture node preview, something like swatchDisplayPort produces, without having to create a file node for each image.

Any help on creating thumbnails of HDR's in a UI would be greatly appreciated.

[joojaa]

QUOTE(jbravado @ 01/21/09, 01:15 AM) [snapback]299295[/snapback]
I had a request from a coworker to produce a UI of an image thumbnail viewer. You'd be able to click the thumbnails and have them map to an environment sphere in the scene.

Open the visor, if you put in .swatches folder and small iff files sith .swatches extensions it creates thumbnails for your inages. you can also drag and drop renders on top of files to generate thumbnails. The files are very simply just inported on click, they also support drag and drop. Maya also allows them to be scripts which are easy to generate.

Visor also zooms as much as you want so if you put very big swatches you can zoom in on them. Also image formats auto matically zoom.

Thus if you put lightning environments in theese files with simple export of as a on load script they will get executed just like your coworker wants and you need to do NO SCRIPTING because its built in.

Also you can dock visors to the hypershade for shader libraries, or anywhere really. I think its the most neglected maya tool by the way.

QUOTE
swatchDisplayPort produces

Yup tahts what visor does. Im supprised you havent used visor for anything yet.

[jbravado]

Wow. Save me some scripting. =p
Roughly six years of maya now and I haven't onced opened the visor. I kid you not.

*facepalm.

Thanks!

[joojaa]

QUOTE(jbravado @ 01/22/09, 12:47 AM) [snapback]299354[/snapback]
Roughly six years of maya now and I haven't onced opened the visor. I kid you not.

I'm not exactly supprised. How many of you actually read the manual section about maya gui? I would bet out of 100 persons about 2 read it, of those 2 in 100 realized how to use it*. Hence "I think its the most neglected maya tool by the way."

*resulting in 4 persons in 10,000