Thumbnails for Scene Elements

When you work with images in Softimage, many views display thumbnails of your scenes' image clips, and sometimes of external images. This makes it easy to identify and select specific images from those views.

You can achieve the same thing for other scene elements by setting thumbnails for them. This is especially useful when you want to make things like shapes, actions, materials, and so on available from a custom shelf or toolbar.

Most scene elements can have thumbnails. As a general rule, if an element can be renamed, you can assign a thumbnail to it.

Elements that can have thumbnails include: objects, cameras, lights, nulls, materials, groups, models, shapes, actions, mixers, and so on.
Elements that cannot have thumbnails include: operators, properties, parameters, and so on.

TipThe SDK Example workgroup includes a relational view called RV - Thumbnail Viewer that can be used to explore the thumbnails on elements in your scene. For information about connecting to the SDK Example workgroup, see SDK Example Workgroup [Customization].

Finding Your Thumbnails

All thumbnails are stored in the project's Thumbnails folder. When you set a thumbnail for a scene element, the thumbnail image is either created in or copied to that folder.

NoteProjects created in older versions of Softimage do not have a Thumbnails folder. The folder is created automatically when you first set a thumbnail for an element in one of the project's scenes.

Assigning Thumbnails to Scene Elements

You can set thumbnails for scene elements in one of two ways:

By setting an existing image as the thumbnail for one or more elements. The image is copied to the project's Thumbnails folder.

or
By creating a thumbnail for one or more elements from the render region. The new image is added to the project's Thumbnails folder.

To use an existing image as a thumbnail

Open an explorer (press 8).
Right-click the object for which you want to set a thumbnail and choose Set Thumbnail from the menu.
From the browser that opens, select the image that you wish to use as a thumbnail and click OK.

The image is set as the object's thumbnail. A copy of the image is added to the project's Thumbnail directory.

To create a thumbnail from the render region

Draw a render region in any 3D view.
Open an explorer (press 8).
Right-click the object for which you want to set a thumbnail and choose Set Thumbnail From Region from the menu.
From the browser that opens, enter a name and file format for the new thumbnail image and click OK.

You don't need to set a path. The image is automatically added to the project's Thumbnail directory and set as the object's thumbnail.

Managing the Size of Thumbnails

Thumbnails are not tied to the image proxy generation options that you set in the rendering preferences. The images stored in the Thumbnails directory are full-size, and are only scaled down when they are displayed. Using large images as thumbnails can slow performance when the thumbnails are displayed. The largest size displayed is 64 by 64 pixels, so there's no point saving a larger image than that.