Images in Carrara EnvironKit - Woodlands
Oldminer
Posts: 134
I have Carrara 8.5 and bought Carrara EnvironKit - Woodlands! love it but I have no Images in either Basic Plants (jpg attached Basic Plants) or in Nature (jpg attached Nature). The icons still work but it would be nice to have images! Do I have some setting I need to change?
Basic_Plants.jpg
1152 x 163 - 39K
Basic_Plants.jpg
1152 x 163 - 39K
Nature.jpg
561 x 182 - 28K
Comments
I beta tested this for Dart as far as I could. I use C7.2 Pro and he created it in C8 and there were updates to the plant editor so I couldn't actually load the plants, but as I recall the thumbnails showed up. Perhaps the DL was corrupted? You should either have the thumbnail he included. or a generic Carrara thumbnail. Not a plain white one.
Thanks, I'll re-download might solve the problem!
FYI
Works ok on my 8.5pro
windows 7 64
I tried re-installing, still no images. I have images in Leaves. I also don't have images in Underwater Realms.
maybe you need to reset preferences?
Do you have any thumbnail images in the Scenes>Landscapes>Dartenbeck>Environ Kit>Woodlands>Background Maps? I'm wondering if the problem is related to the Objects tab....not really sure.
Also, how did you install the kit?
I have thumbnails in Scenes and if I load a plant then re-save in the same Objects folder I get the thumbnail. When I add a folder of the Plants/Basic/Dartanbeck/Basic i contains no thumbnails??
Very odd. They are not jpeg, but png built right into the CAR file. I wish I could help, but this one is beyond me.
I noticed, that the objects in your screenshots are in reverse alphabetic order.
Should not be I think.
How did you install those?
This is one of those mysteries I find interesting. I actually tried installing the kit on another PC at my home last night to see if I could reproduce the problem, but I just couldn't make it happen. I tried several ways (adding folder and choosing differant types), but no luck. I generally just copy the folders/files from the install package to the correct Carrara folder and bypass the "add folder" option. It would help to know exactly how the kit was installed. Wendy's suggestion of resetting preferences might work.
I'd also try choosing the differant size options for the thumbnails (small, large, no thumb) just to see if that triggers a change.
I don't know why, because I'm really dumb about this sort of thing, but I am tending to think that this problem might lay entirely outside of Carrara? Maybe it's one of those video card check boxes in preferences? DAZ QA runs this stuff through its paces pretty good before it meets approval.
Video card, Memory, Operating System, preferences---they may all play a part. I had problems with the Windows 7 Aero feature and Carrara 7 until I changed my video card, so the symptom can sometimes be far from the cause. It's odd that, as described, the problem only occurs on the Objects tab. The OP might want to submit a bug report--a Carrara developer will probably know what could cause a "white thumbnail".
Video card, Memory, Operating System, preferences---they may all play a part. I had problems with the Windows 7 Aero feature and Carrara 7 until I changed my video card, so the symptom can sometimes be far from the cause. It's odd that, as described, the problem only occurs on the Objects tab. The OP might want to submit a bug report--a Carrara developer will probably know what could cause a "white thumbnail". Good call, Salem!
More of a punt, really! :)
I get white or missing thumbnails in all my software and windows explorer when low on virtual RAM mostly when using multiple highpoly large textured Daz figures in iClone, Daz studio can do it too with things like the entire dreamhome fully furnished which carrara handles very well btw AFTER taking a half hour to load!
I removed Carrara 8.5 and all installed files then re-installed (Carrara 8.5 Pro 64bit) and all the other software still same problem. I submitted the problem to Technical Support so will leave it their hands. Thanks to all for their help.
I don't know what platform you're on, but I have noticed the same issue on my Mac (OS X 10.6.8). It's not restricted to Dartanbeck's files, either. It happens on a couple of hair products, on some things from PhilW, Dimension Theory Skies of Economy, and a bunch of presets.
All installed with DIM.
Haven't tried on an equivalent installation on a PC yet.
interesting - have never seen this on any of mine
What he said.
For me it's pretty much a crapshoot whether the previews will show up or not. For example, Tim Payne's Skies 2 has nice previews, but Skies 1 doesn't. For me, Dartanbeck's EnvironKit Woodlands has previews, but some other things don't. It is consistent only in that it persists across restarts, i.e. if one set of things doesn't have previews, it won't ever have previews (although sometimes a full reinstall makes a difference ... and sometimes it doesn't, or something else goes away).
This has been a longstanding issue with Carrara, at least on my Mac.
If a file has no preview inside, Carrara substitutes it with an own image, depending if Object, Shader, etc. For Objects it's a cube, a sphere and a cone.
I just did a search "png issues on Mac", and this was one of the responses:
Fix PNG Images in IE - Mac OSX Hints
I wonder if such a fix would work for this?
This is exactly the sort of issue/fix I was thinking... sometimes we install stuff on our machines that take control of how certain files are handled - without us necessarily being aware of the fact.
Any Mac users know anything similar that might be the culprit?
Interesting idea, but that's a very old post - the datestamp says it's from 2002 - and a lot has changed in OS X since then. For one thing, there's no QuickTime preference panel in the System Preferences application any more. I'd be surprised if this turned out to be the issue, or the fix.
In my Carrara, the presets from Tim Payne's Lightdomes 2 have previews, but the presets from Lightdomes 1 do not. I opened up a file from each set using a text editor. As far as I can tell, both of them have embedded preview data, which is included in the file in exactly the same way. However, I'm not familiar with the Carrara file format -- it's possible that there are subtle differences that I'm missing.
Since I reinstalled Carrara, Lightdomes 1 is actually the only set of items to have a blank preview (that wasn't the case before). Your EnvironKit (which is a great product, by the way - congratulations) has all the previews you'd expect. The only other problem I see on my system is that the previews for 'Realistic Sky' under the 'Misc' tab are also screwed up. However, they're messed up in a different way: I think the actual previews are bad.
My gut feeling is that this is a problem with Carrara. If everyone was reporting missing previews on the same products, then that would point to a problem with the products. If everyone was reporting missing previews on all products, that might point to a problem with either Carrara or the OS libraries used to render certain types of images. But the fact that reports seem to be all over the place makes me think that it's a subtle bug in Carrara itself.
I just checked a corresponding install of 8.5 on Windows 8, and I see blank preview icons there as well. In this case, the Skies of Economy are solid white on both systems. The Portrait Studio pictures are white on the Mac, but do show up correctly on the PC.
It looks to me like this is indeed Carrara-specific. The same symptoms on different OS's leaves out the possibility of Quicktime or an out of date library, I would think.
Should be worth updating the bug report with these results - the more info the better (as well as an indication of how wide-spread the problem is). One thing I didn't check, since I don't have the software installed - does this occur on earlier releases of Carrara? Like, on 8.1?
I have 12GB memory in My iMac running OS 10.9 I haven't had missing thumbnail in other files. I submitted an incident report to DAZ Technical Support hope they will pass it on to the Carrara bug chasers!