Creative Thumbnails for Poser

 

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How do people add logos to their thumbnails? (Besides corporate sponsorship.) How do you get transmapped hair to show up in the thumbnails? Have textures and backgrounds show up? You cheat.

In addition to a photoediting program like Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro, you'll need yarp's wonderful P3d0 Explorer for this tutorial. You can find it at Seno Software. You'll also need their .rsr <-> .png converter plugin. Both are free.

In this example, I am making a custom thumbnail for a pose. This will work just as well for character thumbnails, prop thumbnails, etc. This tutorial works for P4, PPP and P5. With a small amount of work, this will work for MACs. (Sorry, I don't have a MAC to figure out the tweaks.)
 

P4, PPP, and P5

  1. Create the pose you want to use. Mine was Sleeping1.
  2. Save it to the library. Blah, blah, blah thumbnail! Let's get real.
  3. Render the image as a square image - width and height are equal.
  4. File: Export the image as a .jpg file. To make life easier, save it in the same directory that you saved the post. I called mine Sleeping1.jpg.
  5. Close Poser.
    If you have PPP or P5, please go into Windows explorer and rename the sleeping1.png thumbnail sleeping1-old.png.
  6. Open up the .jpg file in your photoediting program. If you saved it in the same folder that you saved your pose, it will be in [wherever Poser is located]\Runtime\Libraries\Pose\[pose folder you used]. My kitty cat is in c:\program files\poser\runtime\libraries\pose\kitty.
  7. Make whatever enhancements you want to the picture. I added a logo at the bottom of mine.
  8. Flatten the image.
  9. Rename the background to Layer 0. In Photoshop 5.5, I double click on the Background in the Layers Palette and it offers to rename it to Layer 0.
  10. Reduce the image size to 91 x 91 pixels. It's the magic number. (The width has to be 91 pixels. Some people have made longer thumbnails, but I've heard rumors of compatibility problems, so be careful.)
  11. Save the image as a 16 bit .png file. Use the same name as the pose: sleeping1.png in this case. Note: if your program doesn't support 16 bit .png files, don't worry, there's a way around this.
     

PPP or P5

Delete the original sleeping1-old.png file and you're done.
 

P4 only

  1. Open up P3d0 Explorer.
  2. Browse to the correct pose directory.
  3. Click on Tools: Convert Rsr2Png. In the next screen, choose: .png to .rsr.
  4. P3d0 will create a .rsr file out of the .png file.
  5. Delete the .png file and you're done.
     

Note for PPP and P5 users


If you get a blank thumbnail, then there was an incorrect setting in your .png file or your paint program is a putz. Don't worry, it's easy to fix.

  1. Close Poser.
  2. Open up P3d0 Explorer.
  3. Browse to the correct pose directory.
  4. Click on Tools: Convert Rsr2Png. In the next screen, choose: .png to .rsr.
  5. P3d0 will create a .rsr file out of the .png file.
  6. Delete the .png file.
  7. Click on Tools: Convert Rsr2Png. In the next screen, choose: .rsr to .png.
  8. Delete the .rsr file and you're done.
     

Batch conversion

If you have a large number of thumbnails you want to convert, you might as well do all the pose saves and renders at one time, then do all the thumbnail enhancements, then the thumbnail conversions. P3d0 will batch convert for you.
 

Offering thumbnails to other people

You need to make .rsr files for P4 users or they will not have a working thumbnail. If you want, you can include just .rsr thumbnails as PPP and P5 will automatically create .png files for you, but then the PPP/P5 user has to clean up the .rsr files later on.

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