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I was just wondering if thumbnail support for windows 7 x64 was working or in the works for a future release. I've tried to register the thumbnail driver manually but it doesn't seem to be taking. This isn't a make or break kind of thing for me but I do prefer TVPaint over photoshop or painter for just sketching a lot of the time and having the ability to preview a file via an explorer thumbnail just feels nice, I kind of miss it since upgrading to windows 7. For animation files this isn't a huge deal since I typically keep files together as projects with concept art and stuff but I tend to dump all my random sketches into a single location and it can get visually confusing with all those big orange icons. I guess I could just get into the habit of saving out to .psd when I not working with animation within TVPaint.

Here is the dll that allow windows 64 bits to display thumbnail of TVPaint files.

uncompress the zip file,
edit the bat file, add the full path before the .dll file name( regsvr32 .\TVPThumbnail64.dll -> regsvr32 c:\User\.....\TVPThumbnail64.dll )
save the file, right click on the .bat and select "execute as administrator"

edit the bat file, add the full path before the .dll file name( regsvr32 .\TVPThumbnail64.dll -> regsvr32 c:\User\.....\TVPThumbnail64.dll )

But which folder should the full path name lead to ? The TVPaint folder in the program files folder?

Sewie wrote:

edit the bat file, add the full path before the .dll file name( regsvr32 .\TVPThumbnail64.dll -> regsvr32 c:\User\.....\TVPThumbnail64.dll )

But which folder should the full path name lead to ? The TVPaint folder in the program files folder?

A good path is "C:\Program Files\TVPaint Developpement\TVPaint Animation Pro" but you can uncompress it everywhere since the file must stay in this folder.

oh wow this is great! just what I was hoping for, I was prepared to settle for using the psd export function thanks for the quick fix!

I know this is a little after the fact but I noticed that the thumbnails for tvp files behave strangely in certain circumstances. For instance, when I try to preview the thumb at a large size within explorer with the preview pane or set the display for the folder to large or extra large there is a large amount of white space around the thumbnail as if instead of scaling up to fit it just adds empty white space. I noticed this behavior in windows xp when viewing the thumbnails from within adobe bridge but I never worked bridge into my everyday workflow so It never bothered me. Is this a known issue or limitation in the way that TVP generates the thumbnails. I imagine it has to be a lot different generating thumbnails for animation then just plain layers like most image based programs.

The reason I started looking into this functionality in TVP is because I discovered a wonderful peice of software that generates thumbnails for PSD files and TGA files among others so that they can be viewed in Windows Explorer. I work with a lot of 3d Animation and modeling and being able to see my texture files in these formats is a wonderful time saver. This made the TVP files stick out even more before I started this thread and got the working .dll for TVP files. Anyway, I inquired with the author of the thumbnail software if he would be willing to add support to his product for the TVP format and he said he couldn't do it without getting hold of some information about the file format used by TVP. Now that I have things working through the .dll that Herve provided it's not a huge deal but his product does add some extra functionality to even standard jpg thumbnails and it might be an interesting addition to have TVPaint added among its supported formats. So my question is whether or not the sdk for the file format that TVP uses is available somewhere so that he can see if there is a thumbnail he can easily extract to use for his software? I imagine it wouldn't be an easy task on his end as I suspect that TVPaint doesn't do thumbnails the same way a lot of other softwares do.

Anyway here is a link to the software in question... http://mysticcoder.net/mysticthumbs.html