Darn, Dirty Prefs
November 27th, 2006 by Luc-Eric - Viewed 1892 times - Popularity: 8%Figuring out which user preference you have modified in XSI is much easier since the last few releases.
First and foremost, only the user preferences that are different from the factory defaults are saved. This was partly done to allow overriding a user preference with a workgroup user preference file.
They are saved in your user account, which for historical reason is in c:\users in Windows, in a file called default.xsipref. This is an ASCII file you can open and edit in Notepad.
One window that’s often overlooked is the grid control that is displayed when you open the User Preference window. You can sort by columns; if you click twice on the last column, all the user preferences you have modified will be grouped at the top.
One trick that very few people know about is that you can right-click on a user preference family and choose “Restore Default” to reset that group to the factory defaults.
This is a real life-saver if you have been playing around with the Scene Colors and now you don’t know how to put it back. Resetting them this way will only change back the Scene Colors and will not change anything else.
Pretty much everything that is remembered from session to session is saved in that user preference file. One exception are the settings for the file browser dialog. These settings are saved in a binary file in your user account called “DSModalBrowser” and include the size and position on screen of the file browser and list view or thumbnail mode setting (but not the thumbnails themselves).
If you switch between a dual monitor and single monitor and the file dialog is offscreen, or the file browser crashes in thumbnail mode, simply delete this “DSModalBrowser” file to reset it to the default settings.
November 27th, 2006 at 3:24 pm
the ASCII pref file took the place of some startup events i created for XSI.
In my case we had some render nodes without python on them so the startup event was pointless. i just edited the renderfarm profile’’s pref file. set the desired prefs and all is well. and recently we put python on all the nodes but the “ref model prefix” pref was still acting inconsistently. so in the end editing the pref file was better than creating a ton of code as a startup event.
thanks for sharing
steven
November 27th, 2006 at 4:00 pm
A question: Is it possible to change the default image saving format? It’’s by default TGA.
November 27th, 2006 at 7:11 pm
hello Luc-Eric,
My time display format preference is set to SMPTE, but, each time i start xsi, i need to open the display tab of the preferences window, otherwise the time is always displayed as frames.
Am i doing something wrong ?
Thanks for the tips