Thumbnail Generator for Blueprint

ctzn_no7 · March 20, 2017, 5:48pm

Hello forums!

Now that Inventories and crafting are getting rather popular in games, I figured I should channel the inner-lazy and make something that cuts photoshop work-hours to minimum.

Thumbnail Factory:***

Be warned, I have not tested this in real world applications, nor have I benchmarked the performance/memory usage. But at very least, it might save you some time during prototyping at the cost of performance.

First: Material

this will be used in the UI widget, nothing fancy
You can use it in the game world too, just set material settings for your needs

Second: The Factory 1/2 - Construction Script

Third: The Factory 2/2 - Event Graph

EDIT: Draw Texture - node is not required

and Fourth: Usage Example

Example end result:

Getting the settings right might take some fiddling and testing depending on the asset sizes/shape

I’m open for improvement ideas, I have very limited knowledge how textures and materials work in the engine.

anonymous_user_e56506341 · December 15, 2017, 4:53pm

Too lazy to spend hours in Photoshop making thumbnails, spends hours making a thumbnail generator instead.
lol but its cool and will definitely save time in the future!

Muzaheed · April 3, 2018, 10:15am

CAN U POST the example assets?

anonymous_user_45e59477 · July 26, 2019, 8:54am

I want to imitate what have you done… But It is so difficult for me …TOT
If it doesn’t matter… May I receive your example project…?

TerrorMedia · July 28, 2019, 6:27am

In all reality depending on how many thumbnails you might need making this might be faster than it would be to make the first initial batch of thumbnails even. Photoshop is crazy time consuming even for seemingly simple things a lot of the time. If this took a couple hours that’s not bad because a few dozen thumbnails in high quality can take just as long depending on how you want them and what you have to work with to start.

I like this idea though it sounds interesting and could definitely be useful.

DamirH · July 28, 2019, 11:28pm

Mind you, this makes sense to do OFFLINE, meaning not at runtime, but make this an editor-only utility to, in one click, generate the thumbnail for your item BP and assign it to the BP.

ctzn_no7 · August 22, 2019, 9:24am

huh, never figured someone would find this thread :rolleyes:
As DamirH said, offline use is probably the most reasonable way to go about it, this was merely a concept of utilizing Scenecapture to do automated work for you.
Instead of drawing the material to widget, you could just export the capture as image, giving UI artists a nice starting point-reference to work with the actual thumbnail