Could Prusa Slicer be used to render a 3D view of .stl files is the preview pane in Windows Explorer?
Hi, I have a question: Could Prusa Slicer be used to render a 3D view of .stl files is the preview pane in Windows Explorer?
At the moment, you have to download a third party app to make .STLs rendered as a 3D thumbnail image or larger picture in the preview pane of Windows Explorer. It occurs to me that Prusa Slicer, or some other derivative plug-in could probably do that and thereby increase the utility of the whole suite of Prusa software...
Is that a sound idea?
And if not, what are peoples recommendations for the best (and free) plug in to make .STL files show as a rendered 3D thumbnail or picture?
RE: Could Prusa Slicer be used to render a 3D view of .stl files is the preview pane in Windows Explorer?
I use ThumbHost on my Mac but I'm sure there's something similar for Windows on GitHub. Just try "stl thumbnail preview GitHub"
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RE: Could Prusa Slicer be used to render a 3D view of .stl files is the preview pane in Windows Explorer?
It would have to be a Windows plugin of some type to do that. Windows would have to know how to deal with the file type. I just looked at a 3mf file and there is a png file embedded in the file. Windows Explorer would need to be able to look through and find that file.
RE: Could Prusa Slicer be used to render a 3D view of .stl files is the preview pane in Windows Explorer?
On Winblows I use the Microsoft addon "PowerToys" (free download in the Microsoft Store or from the github repository) to generate thumbnail icons of .stl files (and view embedded thumbnails in (b)gcode files). There may be other programs for Winblows that I'm not aware of that also provides this feature.
I can also see the embedded thumbnails in 3mf and FCStd (FreeCAD) files in Winblows. Both of these formats are actually zipped folder structures that include a thumbnail image. I don't think PowerToys parses those so Winblows might be smart enough to know to look for the thumbnail image file inside the zipped file. But there seems to be a glitch where the thumbnail gets quickly replaced with a gray rectangle if the 3mf (and FCStd) files are in a OneDrive folder. PowerToys does give a warning about this for the files that it parses: "Thumbnails might not appear on paths managed by cloud storage solutions like OneDrive, since these solutions may get their thumbnails from the cloud instead of generating them locally."
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