Keep aspect ratio on snapshots

When you take a snapshot and save it to disk, the picture looks great, and has the same aspect ratio as your window that SL is in. But when you save that same snapshot as a texture, it gets randomly squashed to streached into some other aspect ratio. Why?

Saving a snapshot should preserve the aspect ratio, and not distort the image.

You know, I hate this too. But I don't think it's the aspect ratio of the image itself, but rather, the window that displays it. It would be nice if the window size was scaled for the image size.

when you save as texture it gets squashed to 512x512 why?

well lest say the aspect is 4:3 you cant translate that to powers of 2 (which is required by open GL textures)

Uploading an image from disk also gives it a funky aspect ratio. Saving an image as a snapshot is really implemented the same way as uploading an image, so it's no surprise you get the same problem.

This is really surprising to me as a new user. The texture window needs constraint like in most graphics packages--hold the shift key and constrain proportions.

The only way around it I've learned (and for one situation only) is to note the size of the image in photoshop. Create a prim cube at 1/10th the size. Upload and apply the texture, and size up the cube proportionally. That's how I show people my images in world, because giving them the textures to view on their UI makes them stretch horizontal.

Textures are rescaled so that their dimensions are at the nearest power of two (256x256, 512x512, 512x256, 256x128, etc.) so that they will play nice with video cards. That is why they get squashed. However, I see no reason why SL can't remember the original dimensions and size the display window to match.

As an aside, if you want to upload an image to SL, you may find that it comes out sharper if you rescale it to power-of-two dimensions yourself before you upload it. SL's rescaler gives gross, blurry results sometimes. Use the smallest resolution possible that still gives you the amount of detail you need, so you don't wind up wasting video card memory for everyone who sees the texture. It's extremely rare that a texture needs to be above 512x512 and many do fine as 256x256 or even 128x128.

As others have mentioned, the difference is simply that, when you save a snapshot to disk you get a bitmap on your hard disk, when you save it as a texture, you get a texture in your inventory. Bitmaps on your disk can have any size, textures are limited to these funny sizes with their edges a power of 2.

This is only a problem when you watch those snapshots by double clicking on them. Simply drop your snapshots into one of the many free pictures browsers available in SL and scale the display prim 4:3 and voila: you are looking at a perfectly proportioned snapshot.

If you have a widescreen monitor like I do, and you are running SL in a window, before you take your snapshots just double click on the window title bar. This will reduce your window and give you the standard snapshot size. You can always maximize it again when you are finished taking snaps.

Here is a link to an illustration...hope this helps!:

http://www.never30.com/images/512view.jpg