Old Content thumbnails--problem
Okay. I have mentioned this in a couple of other threads, but not made a big issue of it. However, it is a problem, and it makes DAZ look worse than they have any need to. Even though I can see that it's not necessarily a high-priority problem, it really needs to be added to the to-do list.
There's a lot of old content in the store which is still usable for rather a lot of things. However people are likely to be reluctant to do so if they don't know what it is. And from the thumbnails which one gets in DS4 (and DS3 as well, this is an *old* problem) they absolutely can't.
Or not unless we load it into the scene on spec in hopes that it might be useful, or releveant. There's generally nothing wrong with the actual product, other than anything that's typical of a product of the relevant age.
And there is no way of knowing whether you're going to end up with one of these products because you won't know until you've ionstalled it and discovered that the thumbnail is borked.
I've been resetting downloads on some of these, and in about a third of the cases the new files have fixed the problem, or part of the problem. But not usually. They've added metadata, but they've still got borked thumbnails.
SO. Has anyone got a tut on creating new thumbnails that the program will read? Most of these are things like .pp2 files with .rsr files accompanying them and I've no idea of what I would need to do to do a screenshot and reduce it into the size needed and save it as something that the program would read.
Am including a screenshot of what I'm talking about. It is not helpful.
Comments
There are RSR to PNG converter utilitys..... I have one... but I just looked and it doesn't have the website it came from... but I am pretty sure it was free. It converts the RSR to PNG only if there isn't already a corresponding PNG. If I remember correctly it keeps the old RSR file but you could clean it up later.
Dizzi's free rsr to png converter
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/freestuff/details.php?item_id=57197
Edited to add: as Poser since Poser8 doesn't load rsr at all, I don't think this will ever have high priority ...
Promising. Does anyone know it it will run on a Mac? I only see versions of Windows on the system info.
.rsr is just a disguised .pict file, so any Mac image editor should be able to do the job - at worst, I think, you'd need to do a batch rename to change the extension then a batch format conversion. Work on copies, of course.
Aha! This sounds like a job for PhotoshopUser! Thanks, That ought to settle the issue nicely. (if current versions of Photoshop can get the .rsr file open.)
I use RSRConv on Snow Leopard.
Thank you. I'll grab it.
I was using Yarp's P3dO Explorer back when I was using older products in Poser 5 and 6 -->
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/freestuff/details.php?item_id=68433
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Unfortunately, it won't do you any good JOdel because I see, it too, is Windows only.
Well, the RSRConv certainly helps. But it turns out that I seem to have an additional factor to the problem and don't know where I have to go to find it, or what it is.
It turns out that not all of the files with the bad thumbnails have .rsr files. There *appears* to be nothing but the .pp2.
So, where are the thumbnails coming from, and where to I find them to try to fix them?
Rather a lot of the Multiplane Cyc environments are ones with bad thumbnails, and I don't see any .rsr files anywhere in that runtime, now. I dropped the whole runtime on the converter to no apparant effect, so presumably they are all .png files in there now. But evidently, the problem is not bad .rsr files, since the bad thumbnails are still bad, and I don't see anything resembling either an .rsr OR a .png in those folders. Just a mess of .pp2 files which so far as I can tell are exactly like all the other .pp2 files in those folders.
Anyone know where those thumbnails are likely to be being generated from?
Very old content uses resource forks on the Mac version -- I don't know if current Macs can use those. Many (possibly all) of the old products with installers that don't run on current Macs are now in Zip files with rsr's/png's -- reset the product to get the current files.