Help! Need a decent .obj viewer!!!

[coldby]

Hi all,
while tiding up my computer (just another way to spend a rainy Sunday) I found out that in the course of a few years someone must have downloaded many zillions of umptillions of free 3D objects - it was probably me.
Now: some of them have pretty descriptive names so they can be ordered neatly and painlessly; but where the heck would you put an SKC3842XX.obj without first opening it to find out if it is a cat, a pulley, a shoe, a severed head, a luscious girl, an SF robot, a screwdriver or whatever else?
Right here lies the problem: AC3D can do that, but awkwardly: first you must open AC3D, then you must browse for your obj, and only then you can import it and see what it looks like - feasible for a fistful of unknown obj's, not very convenient for a few dozens, virtually inapplicable for more than that.

Thus would anyone recommend me a simple, brutal, unsophisticated but quick and handy program to do that and only that? I googled long and hard for something suitable, but my success was astonishingly poor: the best one I found succeeded crashing my system after the third object - and it was just the demo :)

Thanks a lot for any hint you may have!

P.S.: quite naturally the freewarehood would be welcome but it's by no way mandatory.

[Galun]

I don't know a ready object browser that would really save you a lot of time but...

I think I would go for a demo of a game engine. E.g. with jME there are model loaders but for your purpose it would need some changes so that you can load models, create a screenshot, load the next one and so on. That could run for some time and then you can sort your files using the thumbnails.

[coldby]

. . . E.g. with jME there are model loaders but for your purpose it would need some changes so that you can load models, create a screenshot, load the next one and so on. That could run for some time and then you can sort your files using the thumbnails.

Do you really mean that it might create the thumbnails automatically? That would be just GREAT!
Unfortunately I'm not very conversant with game engines, but I still could learn... would you mind being a little more specific?

Thanks!

[Galun]

Once I used a jME based program to convert AC3D models in batch mode. This could as well create a screenshot.
I don't have a ready program for that, but it should be feasible. It took a list of model file names on the command line, loaded the first, saved it in another format and went on with the next without manual intervention.
Let me have a look at the code I still have. It might at least serve as an idea.

[foxa]

Try 3D photo browser at http://www.mootools.com the light version is 20$ and is plenty powerful for most users. It's part of my toolbox.

Art

[coldby]

Thanks a lot, Art! That's exactly what I was looking for (and perhaps a little more) at a ludicrously accessible price. By that link you allowed me to spare several months of my life :)
How did you come to it?

Coldby

[foxa]

You know - it's been so long I don't remember, probably in a forum like this ;-)

Art