Asset Browser: Capture Thumbnail from Viewport - Free Add-on

Hi, I made this simpel free addon to add thumbnails easier in the Blender asset browser directly from the viewport, thought it might be usful to share.

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This solution is brilliantly simple and extremely necessary in the asset creation process, thank you very much.
While testing, I noticed that during the Cycles rendering view the objects are not captures and only the black, white or transparent background is visible or am I doing something wrong?

Thanks! Yeah its weird, seems like cycles is not supported :frowning: Wonder if its a blender bug?

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Anyway I think you did a great thing, even if cycles don’t work:)

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Hello I’m having this error trying to render a thumbnail for a pose asset
Failed to capture thumbnail: Error: Cannot write a single file with an animation format selected

Edit: Ah after googling the error I discovered it is because I had my output settings set to FFMPEG AVI. It was necessary to change it to PNG.

Maybe your addon should show a text box saying to the user
“Please change output format to PNG to render thumbnail” or something like that.
when he tries to click to generate thumbnail without png.

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Thanks for the report @Evandro_Costa Sorry about the issue, this addon was mostly just a quick hack, it should definitely be made more polished.

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No worries! It is very useful! Thanks for you contribution :smiley:

When the transparent background option is on and thumbnail is captured it also turns on the transparent option in Render properties > Film > Transparent, as expected. But its left turned on, even when thumbnail is captured again with the transparent background option off.

Before and After

Hi there.

Thanks for making this.

I’m using EEVEE and Blender 4.5.

I open the blend file with the asset in it. I click the asset in the browser and align the object in front of the camera. It works when I click ‘capture thumbnail from viewport’ but the ‘capture screenshot’ is greyed out.

Is there any way to choose where the images are saved?

My Blender on Linux saves them to /tmp/viewport_thumbnail.png

If I capture another image of a different asset, this file gets overwritten by the new image. No way to change the filename to represent the actual object name?

Again, thanks for making this.

M.

I think this is now a native feature in 4.5.

https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/4.5/editors/asset_browser.html#screenshot-capture-for-previews

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Asset browser store images internally, and it’s one per asset, I don’t think it’s possible to have different assets sharing the same icon data, at least not by default.

Anyway, as @thorn said you don’t need the addon anymore, but since your question is partly about how asset previews works…