We created a new Python library for Blender called 3DN BIP or 3D Ninjas Blender Image Preview. It allows blazingly fast preview loads in Blender. Furthermore, it can load preview images of arbitrary size. It operates as an bpy.utils.previews drop-in replacement and does all the heavy lifting for you.
If I understand well, this is a solution that will allow to speed up the generation of thumbnails for an example in various types of addons that use this type of functionality?
When you load multiple preview images in the Blender UI, it can sometimes take several seconds for them to load completely. With our library, preview images are loaded in milliseconds. Developers can use the library for their addons. The library is especially appealing if you offer a selection of assets and show preview images for them.
Does it work also for regular previews in the File browser window? I mean, if I enable the addon will it help when opening a folder full of images (jpg, exr, png, tif, etc) in the file browser, say to choose a texture for a shader?
Interesting idea. I don’t know if that is possible w/o modifying Blender itself. But we will have a look at it.
Currently, 3DN BIP is an embeddable library for add-on developers. They can copy the folder into their add-on and use the library instead of bpy.utils.previews.
Ok thanks.
I took a look and figure out what this library does. Nice. Fast browser previews would be nice too since when you open a crowded folder the lag is annoiyng, and the previews somtimes are useless because they’re too small
Thanks for developing this! I also with you would write a patch for Blender to use this natively. I have big libraries of textures and it would be amazing if the images were generated as fast as with your library. Great work!
From what I understand, it is possible to convert an image with a .jpg, .jpeg or .png extension to .bip.
But is it possible to save a rendered image from data.images directly to .bip ?
Thanks for the answer but the probleme with image from render resuilt is that the image ahs no data yet.
So I guess the only solution is to save the rendering as a jpeg or png and then convert the image to .bip.
I don’t mind using Pillow at all. I even wonder why it is not part of the basic Blender modules . It’s just that I would have liked to be able to save the renders directly as .bip instead of .jpeg or .png. But it doesn’t matter, I think the user won’t see anything when generating the thumbnails.
Anyway, nice work, it loads the images in a flash .