I’ve been looking for a solution to this forever, and it seems I’m the only one who has a problem with this…
I have a ton of OBJ files I generated in Blender and other apps. And all I want is some way to do the equivalent of opening a Windows File Explorer on my OBJ folders and get auto-generated previews of the objects in the OBJ files. Windows 10 has a 3D viewer, but it only does one object at a time. I haven’t been able to find anything associated with Blender that will do it, other than maybe a more-complicated-than-I-need Asset Manager addon. There’s an app called P3DO Explorer that kinda does it, but the free version requires you click on each OBJ icon to generate a thumbnail. I could generate a .PNG for each OBJ file, but that’s a real pain to go back and to that for every object.
Anyone know of a free solution for this? I have a hard time justifying spending significant $$ for what Window should do natively.
Thanks, but unless there’s some way to use that to open a folder of, say, 50 OBJ files and have it automatically generate thumbnails so you can see what all the meshes look like, then I think it’s not what I’m looking for.
So you want just thumbnails images, not in blender. If you know how to iterate over the files in a directory you may have a look at Caste Engine. I used it (under linux but windows is supported) to make small images of some obj. IDK how you can use them to show thumbs for your obj in explorer (or whate ver) in windows, but you could see the images in it (and with the same name …)
Doing it in Blender is fine, if I could just open, say, the Import file explorer (or whatever it’s called) in Blender and see generated thumbnails of all my OBJ files. However, all I’ve seen in Blender is Asset Manager-type addons that extract objects from .blend files, or just give you an image of an OBJ one at a time.
Cool, thanks. Getting closer, but for some reason this software takes a perfectly clean OBJ from Blender and converts to triangles, and makes alternate triangles invisible. ARRGGHH…
Tried every setting I can think of to fix it, but can’t resolve it. BTW, it happens to every single OBJ, and they’re all composed of quads.
Thanks. Yeah, I gave it a shot and it does kinda work, although for a lot of my OBJ files it fails to generate a preview, while others work okay. And I guess each time you want to explore a different folder you have to go back into Edit/Preferences for the addon and change the file path. And I have a bit of trouble figuring out the global/local designations, and often can’t find the sub folders.
Anyway, I think I’ll stick with the free P3DO Explorer. The only downside is that if you have a new OBJ file, when you open the folder for a preview you have to click on the generic thumbnail and it generates a preview. However, once that’s done it saves the preview for the next time. And it’s really intuitive for those used to Windows File Explorer.
sorry I thought it would work. It is doing the same thing with me at the moment.