Best texture browser?

[Johnny Law]

I'm having the impulse to rip all the textures out of the Q4 pk4s and browse them with some other app. I won't get the benefit of the shader effects from the Q4 media browser, but I'm finding the Q4 media browser realllly hard to use when I'm just trying to see what's generally available.

So, I assume at least some of you out there have done this. I remember in my previous mapping life I used a free/crippled version of ACDSee, but it doesn't look like such a thing exists any more, and I'm not sure that's the best way to go anyway. Got an app you would suggest for this purpose?

[Scourge]

Are q4 textures in .tga form like in Q3? If so, I imagine Irfanview would work.

[Johnny Law]

Yeah, there are TGA versions. I hadn't really thought that Irfanview would be good for browsing large amounts of images but I will poke around in its options...

Edit: Hokay, File->Thumbnails is pretty good.

[seremtan]

you're lucky you can do that in Q4. can't do that in HL2 with .vmt, so i've no idea what textural naughtiness i'm missing out on

fyi, all the HL2 materials appear at once as thumbnails in the browser window, so in theory you can browse every one - assuming of course you have 4GB worth of memory to do it in

[obsidian]

Also, try this plugin. Allows you to view .tga files in Windows thumbnail view.

http://greggman.com/pages/thumbplug_tga.htm

[obsidian]

you're lucky you can do that in Q4. can't do that in HL2 with .vmt, so i've no idea what textural naughtiness i'm missing out on

fyi, all the HL2 materials appear at once as thumbnails in the browser window, so in theory you can browse every one - assuming of course you have 4GB worth of memory to do it in

Yeah, I'm glad that since Q3, Id Software games don't use any of those tiresome custom compressed file formats. Much easier to work with. Just normal textures compressed in a zip file.

[Hipshot]

I have no problem really with HLs or Unreals formats when it comes down to browsing, it works "in editor" and off editor, I don't need to view them, since the only custom textures I work with is mostly my own and shaderlabs and they comes as another format before I convert them, so I see what they look like.

When I need a better viewer than windows built in thumb viewer, I use Acdsee
http://img152.imageshack.us/img152/4720/acdsee4wr.jpg

[junglist]

Also, try this plugin. Allows you to view .tga files in Windows thumbnail view.

http://greggman.com/pages/thumbplug_tga.htm

Thumb Plug is good, but I recommend ThumbView Lite since it handles both TGA and DDS. (No need for a separate plugin.)

I also like how ThumbView centers smaller images instead of aligning them to the upper left, which always annoyed me when using Thumb Plug.