Meta-data and Viewport Thumbnail embedded in .blend file.

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
#1

I was just pondering some useful things I would like to see embedded in 3d files.

I currently don’t know much about the.blend filetype, but I was thinking of having human readable meta-data embedded in the .blend file.

The two key items I was thinking of was:

  1. A thumbnail screenshot of the viewports at time of save. Viewable in either the blender file manager or other file managers if possible. Usable to quickly identify which scene you’re trying to find based solely on visual aspects.

  2. Notes about the scene and possible statistics like poly count or number of frames in scene. Helpful for obvious reasons. Possible sorting by scene length, number of objects, polygon count, etc.

There are plenty of other things it could be used for and it possibly could already be in place.

Like I said, just pondering… Any information of how feasible or impossible this would be is very interesting to me. Also any ideas or flaws you see. Share them.

Fliberty

#2

I would expect that thumbnailing is the job of the File Browser (Windows Explorer, Nautilus, Thunar, etc.). I don’t think there is anyway to have Blender dictate the thumbnails.

#3

I would understand that reasoning for OS file managers, but for the blender one built in it seems it could be easily done. I’m not familiar enough with the way it works though.

#4

I agree on the vertice amount bit any user who might have a bad computer would atleast have a warning this file might make his computer go Boom!idea for an invention a bomb that only explodes if the vert count gets to 100000000

#5

Oh, I’m sorry, I misunderstood you. I didn’t know that you meant from within Blender. Elubie did a lot of work on the Image Browser, basically rewriting it. One of the features added was material preview (useful for appending from material libraries). As I recall, one of the possible future development paths was to allow the previewing of mesh data as well. Meta data would probably be trivial to add.

So your idea is actually pretty feasible, and would be a nice feature for the 2.5x series. :wink: