Offline Library Thumbnails

[ericgsherwood]

Curious if could automate capturing material thumbnails from an offline directory? Visuals representation of an internal Painter shelf to keep track and log material changes.
Was curious if Automation Toolkit would be the right tool and if so how.

[DavidAllegorithmic]

Hi Eric,

When it comes to actually making up-to-date thumbnails and also cooking sbsar files from a library of changing sbs files we have a sample available on github:
https://github.com/AllegorithmicSAS/sat-scons

When it comes to updating painter projects the low-tech solution is to make sure the shelf directory is synced with what comes out of a build process and then run the resource updater plugin on the projects. It is possible to script it more than that so you can update resources without any manual effort but it's not trivial. Let me know if you want me to outline the process for you.

[ericgsherwood]

Thanks David!

That is some helpful information.  It would be great if you could outline the process for me on the painter project you mentioned.  I'm familiar with the low-tech solution, which is what typically do.  But have had people on the team ask if could happen behind the scenes without manually updating.  Any extra information would be great, thanks!

[DavidAllegorithmic]

There are ways to call painter javascript through a network port so you inject a script that loads the file you want and then call the right api calls for updating the resources. This means you can take the manual effort out of it and have it done overnight or any time someone is not working on an spp file. It will still require a full workstation with GPU and a desktop.

Feel free to PM me if you want to get some samples of how this is done.