Hi Maxime and Ferdinand,
Thank you so much for the extensive answers. I am working with @till-niese on this project. First perhaps to clarify what we are trying to do:
- We realize that the asset library creates a thumbnail on its own. However, that thumbnail is, in our case, basically just black and useless and even if it weren't, we need a custom thumbnail to match a specific style that has been requested by our customer.
- Therefore we are basically trying to replicate the functionality you get when you right-click on the thumbnail in the Asset Browser and Click "Update Thumbnail from File...".
- The current version of our automated asset creation does set the thumbnail using
maxon.ASSETMETADATA.ASSET_PREVIEWIMAGEURL
and that works. However, the automated thumbnail creating is also running (as you pointed out, @ferdinand). So if we set out thumbnail before the automated thumbnail creation is finished, it will get overwritten with what the preview render job comes up with. - We currently work around the problem of our manual thumbnails being overwritten, by adding a pretty ten seconds sleep. That works, but it slows our conversion process down significantly and is likely very brittle.
- What is not really a problem for us is when an updated thumbnail does not immediately show in the Asset Browser. It's totally fine if the Asset Browser after our conversion shows the wrong thumbnails, as long as they are all fine after a restart of Cinema 4D.
Bottom line is that it's cool that the asset browser automatically creates thumbnails, but unfortunately those are useless for us because they are not to spec. What would be awesome:
- Perhaps there is a way to just immediately kill the job that creates the thumbnail from being generated in the background or prevent that job from starting in the first place.
- If that is not possible, maybe there is a message we could intercept to know the thumbnail has been updated so we can run our workaround right after the thumbnail creation job is finished instead of waiting a hardcoded amount of time.
- Maybe there is another option that we're not clearly seeing right now?
Thank you again for your help so far! Very much appreciated!
Best
Timm