BlenderExtender: .blend Preview Plugin for Windows Explorer

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blenderextender1pngBrowse your Blender files with the Explorer with this auto-preview generator plugin.

Kurt writes:

Have you ever been browsing around on your computer and thought “Jimminy Gee Willakers, I wish I could see thumbnails for all those 3d files”?

No? Oh well.

But just in case you ever do, I’ve written a cool little windows plugin that uses Blender to auto-generate thumbnails for all your 3d files! Remember tho, this is beta-quality software, so backup everything, especially your registry, before installing!!

  • Platform: Windows
  • Status: Beta. I cannot stress enough BACKUP YOUR REGIRSTRY BEFORE INSTALLING!!!
  • Requirements: Blender 2.48+, Python 2.5

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    • Bastian

      Cool!!!

    • http://www.nyse.com Nice

      That brings me back to the question, why no one has created a blender plugin for IE and firefox browsers, playing blender files using the game engine !?

    • Fabrix

      Blender thumbnails for Gnome:

      http://www.kino3d.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=83323#83323

      needs
      blender (!)
      gnome
      perl

      optional
      imagemagick

      extract, “make install”, restart session

    • chupakabra

      That brings me back to another question, why it is war in the world? :D

    • nawabz

      what if you have a complex scene like the peach project. will it need to render a whole scene to display the thumnail.

    • Nemesis

      I think this is going to very useful for a lot of people, particularly those who are just starting to use blender.

      Good work.

    • Saypen

      I get an error message “Error whilst running ‘pythonw.exe’”….

      P.S
      I have got both blender 2.49 and python 2.5 and python is configured to work correctly with blender (system path is set)

    • http://lasserb.dk Lasphere

      Cool script!

      hey @NICE. Someone has allready thought about that. Somewhere at blenderartist, someone once made a plugin that enabled ‘flash’-like games for websites, made with blender. cant remeber who tho…

    • kotakotakota

      Cool! Too bad I am under Linux, although honestly, I don’t ever think I will go back to Windows. Also, the talk about the web plugin: http://download.blender.org/documentation/oldsite/oldsite.blender3d.org/215_Blender%20news%20Blender%20Publisher.html
      Was that it?

    • Ianvdl

      I get the same message as Saypen, with correct requirements.

    • http://www.blender-pro.com uriel

      Hi super !
      but why in IE (bad browser anyway…and not open source?)
      and why into a browser ? better in the software, no ?

      anyway, it’s a good news !
      bye

    • Trebawa

      Thanks Fabrix! I was just thinking that there should be one for GNOME.

    • http://resourcespace.blogspot.com Tom Gleason

      have the blender developers considered saving a preview image in the file so that it can be accessible to DAM systems and browsers? auto-rendering everything isn’t always such a great (fast) idea, although it does work.

    • panzi

      A long time ago there was an officially supported blender plugin for web browsers. However, nobody wanted to maintain it and therefore it kinda died. There are efforts to resurrect it (look at the blender developers mailinglist) but I don’t know how successful they are.

    • Spamagnet

      @uriel – This plugin is for WINDOWS Explorer, not INTERNET Explorer.

    • impiaaa

      Quick Look plugin for Mac 10.5 please!

    • DiThi

      A plugin like this should not render the image (there are very complex scenes and there are scenes not meant to be rendered). I think it would be much more useful if it renders with openGL the largest 3D window of the blend’s UI, without textures. It would be fast enough for a folder full of complex scenes to be useful.

    • Saverio

      Great idea!!
      The blender file format in the future could contain a little thumbnail..or, maybe, a blender file could be tar.gzed with the thumbnail (i.e: the last rendering) , in order to save the rendering time..

    • gokudomatic

      Looks like a nice idea, but thumbnail in windows is the devil. Since the time in 2k where windows wasn’t letting me disconnect properly usb drives because it was keeping a handle on some video files for generating thumbnails, I’ve always totally disabled this troublesome feature.

      I think it would be preferable to have a small blender file explorer, like acdsee for images.

    • TheHeadlessSourceMan

      Q. What happens with big scenes?
      A. First, this renders only a tiny 96×96 image and also turns down OSA and other goodies so it’s really pretty fast. If the scene still can’t render within 30 seconds (this time can be increased by adding like “killRenderAfter=45″ to the .ini file), a safety watchdog will shut down Blender and you’ll get the “dead monkey” thumbnail for that file. (OpenGL is a great idea. Maybe v2. ;) )

      Q. What’s up with the pythonw.exe error?
      A. I haven’t seen that problem specifically, but I do know that this thing requires the the the actual python25 install. If you have (for instance) Cygwin installed also and that “pythonw.exe” is being found instead, badness results. Let me know what u find out.

    • Sean

      I get the same pythonw error. I love a solution!

    • http://phantommoose.com/ Jordan

      I second impiaaa’s post!

    • Bozo

      Sounds interesting, but… what makes me ponder is the warning to “so backup everything, especially your registry” : I’m not sure about how serious you are with that, since backup/restore of the complete windows registry isn’t really a trivial task (and for restoring an old registry better have you windows repair/install cd ready…).
      Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t expect a shell extension to wreak complete havoc on my registry, but such a warning from the developer isn’t somehing I want to ignore lightly either ;)

    • http://resourcespace.blogspot.com Tom Gleason

      > First, this renders only a tiny 96×96 image and also turns down OSA and other goodies so it’s really pretty fast.

      Nice, do you think you could share some blender command line expertise with the ResourceSpace DAM community so that a quicker rendering technique might be used for our server-side blend previews?

      Right now it’s pretty simple-minded:
      blender -b file.blend -F JPEG -o target.jpg -f 1

    • Alex Blank

      This could be useful…I think I’ll grab myself a copy right about now…
      BTW why does Windows still insist upon having such a finicky, cryptic registry? I understand the logic in having key system parameters logged in a single area, but it just doesn’t do its job (but neither do many other things in Windows either)

    • http://www.excellentWhale.com Joeri

      Something blender should do if you ask me.

    • http://www.DreadKnight666.com Dread Knight

      Anything for KDE4? :P

    • Fonsch

      Slightly related:

      Is there a possibility to show a preview (in Blender) that shows file B while you are working on file A?

      Consider the following scenario: I’m working on file A (like a room) and I’d like to insert all kinds of furniture and other stuff. I have a folder containing all kinds of stuff, but the filename doesn’t give enough info about the actual contents of the file. I’d like to be able to see some kind of preview when I select a file before adding it to my “room” in file A.

      Any ideas / suggestions?

      Thanks