maximum size for preview

Isekai_lover

Hello all, hope you have been well.
Made a piece and just realised there was a preview option, it did not display due to it being too large. Just wanted to know the maximum size for a preview so I do not do this again and can plan better

Nate

There is not actually a fixed size. Instead, if generating the preview takes longer than 2 seconds, then the preview is aborted.

I don't think you need to worry about this. The preview can be helpful, but is not required. The sizes it shows are estimates, so only give a general idea of the actual exported size. This is because it only generates one frame. To be more accurate it would need to generate all the frames and count up the size, and that would take a long.

Instead you can just do an export and check the size. You can also export just one frame and multiple that size by the number of frames in your actual export, which is all the preview size estimate is doing.

Isekai_lover

I see, was not aware that was how it calculated it.

I wished to use the preview to create the border on the animation instead of leaving a large blank space. Is there other means to do this, apologies, still learning the system.

Nate

You can enable rulers (ctrl+shift+R) to better choose world coordinates (in 4.2 it shows you the numbers), then enter the numbers into the Viewport: [X] Crop field. That will be more accurate than dragging the edges in the export preview.

Isekai_lover

Nate Thank you for your guidance.

Nate

Sorry we just realized in addition to the 2 second timeout, there is actually a maximum size. Preview won't show if the image size is larger than 4096 x 4096. In that case it will show the too large size then the error message, like:

6000x5000, Too large for preview.

If the 2 second preview timeout was reached the error is just:

Too large for preview.

In 4.2.09 if the preview is too large or times out, it won't try again and a Reset button will be shown. This allows you to use the export UI without a 2 second pause for every change. If Reset is clicked, the preview is tried again with a 20 second timeout, so you can see a preview even if it takes up to 20 seconds.

We also added a --preview-timeout command line parameter, so you can set your own timeout in milliseconds, eg for 60 seconds:

Spine --preview-timeout 60000