New Update: PSNAP (QuickSave) Plugin - ver 1.5 - FIXED July 10, 05

[Svengali]

* * * * FIX - PSNAP Version 1.5 - another update * * *

The PSNAP_FIX.ZIP file attached below is an updated version of 1.5 with several fixes - Thanks goes to Digits who convinced me to revisit the script once more.

It still works the same except a couple of glitches have been vanquished. As to the question about PSNAP and the Mac. I don't use a Mac myself, but I have had no Mac owner report any problems. Could someone who uses a Mac verify that? Thanks - Sven


WHAT IS PSNAP?

PSNAP is a plugin that provides a set of six buttons used to streamline and automate the saving of your Works-in-Progress.

For example: You are working on a 3dModel and you want to make sure you don’t lose time you’ve already invested in construction.

You would use two of the PSNAP buttons, MODEL which first lets you save your model under an original name, then M+ which saves incremental versions of the same model using the original name and appending sequential numbers to it.

If you press the MODEL button you could assign the name TREE to your original model. PSNAP will save it to disk as TREE001.ZTL (.ztl files are ZBRUSH model files).

From that point each time you press the M+ button, another copy of the current model is saved to disk. PSNAP automatically increments the name so that, over time, you’d save, TREE002.ZTL, TREE003,ZTL, TREE004.ZTL and so on .

You are doing two things here. First, you will have saved a bunch of versions of your model, from its earliest form, to its final result, and all the steps in between. More importantly, you won’t lose your work if something causes Zbrush to crash (not that Zbrush ever crashes…)

PSNAP provides you with the following Six-Button set (the seventh button is PSNAP help.)

IMAGE and I+ buttons save .psd or .bmp or .tif files
MODEL and M+ buttons save .ztl files
DOCUM and D+ buttons save .zbr files

Press these at anytime to create files: save a 2D version of your Canvas, save your 3D Model or save your multilayered Document with its custom materials.





TO INSTALL PSNAP:

Very simple. Download and unzip the PSNAP.ZSC file into your ZSTARTUP/ZPLUGS directory.


:b3::b3::b3:Click here to Download (http://www.zbrushcentral.com/zbc/attachment.php?attachmentid=27909):b3::b3::b3:


The next time you startup Zbrush you will find six new buttons labeled with the above names in the ZPLUGIN menu under a subgroup named Svengali.





NEW TO THIS VERSION (PSNAP 1.5):

(1.) Important note to previous users of the PSNAP utility. You must REINSTALL the PSNAP buttons which will DISAPPEAR from where you had placed them on your interface.


Why? Because the new buttons appear inside the Svengali subgroup, having been removed from the PSnap subgroup. Simply Ctrl-drag the buttons from the ZPlugin menu onto your ZB interface again and press Ctrl+Shift+I which will update your custom interface.

(2.) SubD polymesh models with multiple levels will now be saved at the FIRST level. In a model with many levels, the disk storage savings are considerable. Reloaded models will be at SubD level 1 but all of the other levels will be intact. After being saved, the total count of polygons, points and subD levels will be displayed in a popup Note. Left click the mouse button to continue.

(3.) The DOCUMENT button pair is new to this release. Some users will be happy to see this while others will never have occasion to use them. If you are one of the latter, simply leave the pair of Document buttons off your interface.

Please report any bugs or strange behavior and, PLEASE TEST FIRST by saving and reloading one or more of your non-critical models.

I would really like to acknowledge beta-testing help from: Scott Spencer, Aminuts, and especially Marcus_Civis who also suggested several worthwhile improvements in the code. Appreciated the feedback you guys!

Sven

[Aztec...soljA]

You did it again! lol
Nice aproach, thx again Svengali

[Polaris30]

What a toaly cool idea!

I love this Idea... Thankyou very much for makeing this!!
this will help me alot!

here are a couple of ideas you may want to use for future versions

:b2:In wings 3D we have a function called autosave....

Would it be possible to incorperate a time into a plugin?

So say every 5 minuets the plugin will save a file in the tool's directory called AUTOSAVE.ztl...perhaps an auto disable for this also, so when rendering things it wont interupt durring the render process...

.....

:b2:One other suggestion would be a little toggle button for incremental saves...
so it will make a new file every time you hit the + button...
thus:
filename 1.ztl
filename 2.ztl
filename 3.ztl
filename 4.ztl
filename 5.ztl
filename 6.ztl
filename 7.ztl

I am not a very together person when it comes to saveing my tools and paintings.... I forget all the time, and sometimes after makeing a mistake I save over my work, thus I have to start over... this way I can go back a couple of saves and recover some of my work.


anyways, just an idea...

THis is a great plugin you made, I am going to be useing this all the time....

Thanks for makeing this for us all :cool::tu: this is very nice of you.

[Svengali]

Thanks guys,

Hey Polaris,

Check out the snap help screens [?] and you'll find that both + keys do exactly what you suggest, incrementing the Image or Model name each time you press it... file001.ztl, file002.ztl, file003.ztl, etc.

As for a timer inside ZBrush... I haven't found one. If you do a google search on Freeware timer, you'll find there are hundreds of them. Just run one in the background and everytime it pops up, press Snap and +, and you'll never have to worry again :p

Sven

[aminuts]

Thanks Sven

once again you've made your number one fan very happy:D

I used the old version quite regularly and ya just made it easier!!

Thanks again!

[Polaris30]

LOL!

I was just comeing here to edit my post before anyone saw it LMAO...

Very well done !!!

Thankyou sooo much for this!

BTW, yea the timers are comonly called tea cookers... I have one in linux, and in Black box for windows...

This is a great idea! I will just keep hitting the button after every save :D (and remember to disable it when I render ;):tu: )

I give this post and this Zscript the five tu rateing! Excellent!
:cool::tu::tu::tu::tu::tu:+++

Thanks alot for this :D

[Aztec...soljA]

I like it, I like the features, and the "easy to do" mode but there is something which can be really cool:
How about making buttons with "save image", "save model", "+" and "-" so we can drag them and add them to our interface.

Or nother thing, you know when you save an image, does it always have to be saved in the main folder?

:idea: Or Svengali, why not instead make the MRGZBGrabber get an image so it will collect them within the texture section then we can always export them, the rest is facinating, think about it ok... Take care!:) :p
-Iván

[Svengali]

Aztec,

Hmm. Interesting ideas.

1. I'll test the notion of individual plugin buttons that do each of the SNAP functions. One thing I feel I should add to the current plugin launch of SNAP is an automated return to the Script that was active before SNAP was called up. That way, if you are in the middle of something in another Script, (and that script maintains persistant variables) you can just pick up where you left off.

Will let you know in this thread if I get individual plugin buttons setup.

2. One of the features of this current SNAP release is that you can choose ANY folder for saving images or tools to, and that becomes the default folder for future saves. Try it.

3. I think there might be too many issues in automating MRGBZGrabber, I'll leave that to someone else :).

Sven

[Svengali]

Aztec,

I just posted a new version called PSNAP which installs individual buttons in a subgroup under the ZPlugin menu.

I appended it to the first post in this thread.

Thanks for the suggestion, it makes much more sense this way! I also made the buttons work so the ZScript that was running before the save gets reloaded automatically.

See what you think.

Sven

[Aztec...soljA]

I am going to try it right now.
Thanks for listening :D and once more because u showed us what a master-scripter you are.:tu:
-Iván

[Buckie]

This is excellent Sven, thank you for providing us with such cool stuff that makes ZB sooooooooooo cool...:tu:

[chadtheartist]

Awesome work! I especially like that it now saves the object in the first level. That's going to save a whole bunch of space on my HD!

[Atwooki]

This is just soooo much sweeter, Sven - top stuff :tu::tu::tu:
Not much more to say, other than to reitereate what Chad said above :)

Excellent and thank you!

Chris

[marcus_civis]

I think it bears saying again - this is an excellent update to a very useful plugin. Thanks for the hard work Sven. :tu:

[Digits]

Great Update Sven :tu::tu::tu: Thanks buddy

[Svengali]

Thanks everyone,

The PSNAP utility has evolved quite a lot over the last year. Until the next version of ZBrush is released, this is probably the last PSNAP update. That's not to say there aren't other model scripts in the works. Stay tuned. :)

Matthew: thanks for booting the PSnap update image to the top row. Now more people might be tempted to tryout the update. Appreciate it!

Sven

[willog]

Thanks Svengali this is really good stuff.

Much appreciated

[GLmig]

Thank you very very much, no more paynefull saves :)

[wenna]

Thanks so much for the update as I use PSnap all the time! It makes it so easy! Thanks again!

[Digits]

Hi Sven

Just been using the script and I noticed when you try to autosave a unskinned zsphere model I get an error message when the script uses the Mesh function to get the model's subd level. I think if you check to see if the object has the preview off then you should be able to turn it on before you do the check.

Hope that made sense :)

[Svengali]

Digits,

Thanks for the heads up. I'll check that part of the code, find the problem and try a fix. I'll post my results. :cry:

Sven

[Digits]

In addition

To begin a seq of models you press the "Model" button to assign a filename and then each successive press of the "M+" button assigns a sequence number and saves the model. That works great. I noticed however if you have reloaded Zbrush or reinitialize Zbrush it no longer remembers the BaseName and does not increment the filename. What might be nice would be.

1. The user has put a model on the canvas in edit mode. example Testobj005.ztl
2. The user presses the "M+" button
3. The script checks the ToolName and records the 005 sequence number
4. The Script then updates the 005 to 006 and saves the tool.
5. If the User drags a new (unsequenced Toolname) example Testobj.ztl then the script uses Testobj as the basename and saves the tool as Testobj001.ztl.

This way you really don't even need the "Model" button as the script will get everything it needs from the filename.

Hope that makes sense as well. This is a useful script not only for saving your work but providing models for my PeoplePoker script for example and also another program I am working on at the moment.

[Svengali]

Hi D,

I tried your suggestion to check the Preview button and turn it on if it isn't. That works, nice catch!

Of course this opens a small can of worms involving checking the status of other things (depending on how anal I want to get about restoring everything back as it was before the save.)

Now, I gotta check out the other issues in your second note and how to deal with those. I see that generalized auto-incrementing through the M+ key could be extremely useful. I have to revisit that button's code and see how I might modify it... which may take a while. :confused: )

Sven

[Webhead]

How does this work on a Mac? Anyone tried it? :)

[Svengali]

PSNAP USERS:

I've just now uploaded an updated zipped version of PSNAP.ZSC. Digits pointed out several issues which now seem to be resolved (Thanks Digits!).

If you want the new release, just download the attached PSNAP_FIX.ZIP file at the top of the thread and unzip it right over the old PSNAP.ZSC version in the ZPlugs folder.

Again, if you experience any other problems please post them here.

Sven

[wenna]

Thank you so much for the update!! It works perfectly!!!

p.s. Just a note for silly people like me, when saving as a document, take the tool out of edit first. If you don't, it will ask you if you want to save the doc or the tool, it will save the doc but it also makes a double of the tool on the canvas and puts that one in edit mode. At first I thought it was the plug-in, but after removing that and just tried saving the doc, still did it. So I found out, less headache if you just take the tool out of edit to begin with. Re-installed plug-in and works great!

[Svengali]

Hi Wenna,

Hmm. Good point. Perhaps on the next update I should have PSNAP check for an active model, hide it if there is one before saving the document, then redraw the model and put it back in edit mode.

When I get a minute I'll test that out. Thanks.

Sven

[wenna]

ooooh, that would be fantastic! Much appreciated for all your hard work. Anything that would do that is worth it cause I keep forgetting to do the little things (like going in & out of edit) before I go on to the bigger things (like saving the doc or going to Texture, etc...) does that makes sense? At any rate, your scripts has saved my sanity more than a few times! Thanks again!

P.S. Also Big thanks to the other scripters who has made my life so much easier and fun!

[marcus_civis]

Thanks for the update Sven. :tu: I bet you thought you'd said goodbye to this one. ;)

[Buckie]

Nicely for the fix, didn't really notice any problems, but I don't notice much at all really...:tu:

[TVeyes]

Nice features in this update. Still a very useful ZPlugin. Thanks :tu:

[g.g.]

I know this plug's been out for a while, but I thought I would reply for Mac users who are interested that it works fine on my Mac. thanks for the cool plugin Sven!

Gray

[Webhead]

I know this plug's been out for a while, but I thought I would reply for Mac users who are interested that it works fine on my Mac. thanks for the cool plugin Sven!

Gray
Thanks for the info!

[kyrandian]

This sounds like a plugin I've been dreaming of! Can't belive I've missed it! But I can't seem to find a link to download from? Isn't it available anymore? :confused:

[Svengali]

Yipes!

Kyrandian,

To avoid having people download the wrong version of PSnap I asked Aurick (Matthew) to zap all earlier links. In the process he integrated the comments from the earlier links into this thread.

Looks like in the process we lost the link to the latest upload as well! Sorry about that.

Here is the download for you while I contact Matt to see if we can relink it at the top of the thread.

After you install it, please post if you have any problems. :D

Sven

[kyrandian]

Thanx Svengali!

It works like a charm! :)

[czeko]

Thanks a lot, works perfect!

[elarcano]

Yep! Your Fan Aminuts recommended this plug-in and I'm really happy he did it!

Thanks A LOT Svengali! I'ved always saved my work with incremental numbers but this makes it much more easier and the fact that I don't have to go to the lowest level and then go up makes it even better for me :tu:

It would be cool if the were a button that gives you the possibility to save over the same file name. I mention this because I only save my works with other names when I'm about to do something risky and that I couldn't undo. But if every things going alright I'll save it on the same file... just a thought ;)

Thanks a lot, still have to explore your other ones... and of course I'll thank you for them as well :tu:

[Svengali]

elarcano,

If you click on the model button, it will give you the opportunity to OVERWRITE the most recently saved file... just press enter to confirm.

I borrowed the functionality for this key set from the old, old, dos-based 2D animation package named AnimatorPro from Autodesk. :)

Aminuts' webpage is the Masterlist of must-have plugins, check them all out.

Sven

[elarcano]

Yep! Works perfectly! Dream come true! Thanks again Sven :tu:!!!

[Syed Noman Ahmed Rahmani]

after modleing si that rigging ics nacessary tp animate my charector
aur its already rigged

[Antimorph]

PSNAP is superb, it's been of great use to me. Thanks very much.

[Jhotun]

Anyone has tried this with zb3? This has saved my ass so many times that i do not want to lose it :)

Cheers

[Svengali]

Hi,

I'll take a look at PSnap over the weekend and post a new Z3 compatible version Monday . Gotta check a couple of things, (and I'm still waiting for my upgrade email... :confused: )

Sven

[Jhotun]

Hey Svengali, its great to see that you are upon it :D

Thanks a lot!

[feureau]

Sweeet! I can't wait to get it. The current one don't work. Gave me a warning on each save and took me to the "opening" page. This plug has saved me from a great many redos with the incremental saves. Thanks for revisiting it again. ;) Can't wait to get it.

[Svengali]

Hi guys,

Well, I'm still waiting for my upgrade email... beginning to feel like one of the "Left Behind" here. I won't post anything new until I can be confident it works dependably. Soon enough, soon enough. :)

Sven

[seanforsyth]

Looking forward to it! This is one of my all time favourite scripts. I've heard that with ZB3 you don't need to go back to subdiv level 1 of a tool before saving now, but the incremental save will still prove invaluable.

[Jhotun]

Svengali, take all the time you need. This wonderfull zscript is really a must-have for any day-by-day zbrusher, so it needs to be perfect (just as it is now).
If you need some betatesting, here is my sword :)


Take care!