Attached Link: http://www.microbion.co.uk/temp/example-sheet.jpg

I expect most people here know this already, but it was new to me so some others might find it useful.

If you have large numbers of MAT or pose files to change or pose a figure, it can be difficult to choose the one you want. For example, in one set of poses I bought, there are 71 poses alone and I guess many people have several sets. Moving backwards and forward between sets is a pain, especially in P4/PP when you have to scroll (slowly) down a long menu to visit each set of poses, and then scroll up and down in each set to find the pose you want, which is not only tedious but doesnt allow you to compare poses easily.

However, each pose comes with a thumbnail, which in the case of PP or P5 is usually a .png, and Photoshop can produce contact sheets of these images. Then all you have to do is look at one contact sheet in an image viewer for each set of poses, or you could even combine sets into one sheet.

To do this, use PSs Contact Sheet II function from the File -> Automate menu. Set your document size each thumbnail is 91 x 91 pixels, and youll want a little white space between them; theres also some space required for the caption. I found that the default of 576 x 720 pixels that PS offered me worked just fine for these images, with a grid of 5 x 6 thumbnails on one sheet. Then point it at the folder containing the thumbs PS will tell you how many sheets this will generate, but unfortunately it assumes that all files in the folder are images, so you cant rely on this and let it do its thing. If PS generates more than one sheet its easy to combine them into one image, or you can alter the document size before processing so that it only generates one large sheet.

All you need to do then is save the contact sheet with a suitable name and its easy to find the pose (or MAT file) you want. The screen shot shows part of a sheet as an example.

Thank you for this tip.

Its great, but I have not Photoshop. :( Works it with other programs? Lupa

Attached Link: http://perso.wanadoo.fr/pierre.g/xnview/endownload.html

For anyone using Poser 4,which doesn't use pngs, you might try Yarp's P3DO Explorer which will show thumbnails from rsr files. You can then do a screen capture to save this as a contact sheet. If you hide the navigation bar on the left, you can have 48 thumbnails at the default 91x91 size and many more if you go to 48x48. The image will have the P3DO menus at the top but you can crop that out in an editor or use a capture utility that allows you to capture only the image part of the screen. Lupa, you can make contact sheets with the free graphics viewer Xnview.

Oh, thank you for this information. Greetings Lupa

Another option is to use Irfanview's, free viewer, thumbnail option to create contact sheets.

I didn't realise Irfanview could do this. In fact Irfanview's method is better than Photoshop - much simpler to use. I'll be using that in future :-)

Good tip, thanks Spedler.