Blender Underground

ok well i was working on a project and i needed a material... so i used the browser to try to find one but it dosen't show a preview of what your getting which i think its frustrating to say the least... it means that if you have an archive of say 20 stone materials you'll have to import every single one to check if that was the one you want... a simple preview window would make it so much quicker.

Don't quote me on this but, I think that's something that's coming in 2.50!

fingers crossed your sources are right

Um, I'm using 2.49 and the idea is to hold down CTRL while you click the LOAD button to load an image.
It may be a bit sluggish but if you wait for the previews to load it works fine.
Of course, your machine is probably different to mine but try it anyway.

Also, this is where carefully naming all those texture pics comes in: a tedious but useful task, only it still isn't as good as those previews.

oh so thats how you get it to use the image browser.. that'll be a handy trick ...but it would be good if they could improve it to make it so that you get a preview of .blend files and perhaps have something smiler for materials so when you try to append materials from other files you get a preview of that.

Right on there.

Have you tried that "save previews" button (or whatever its called) in the prefs?
Not sure if it works but maybe . . . . . . . ?
Can't try it myself now, shortly . . . . . . . .