Photos and Screenshots

I've been working on this for a while and would welcome any advice:

I want to take pictures for my vendors. I've tried taking snapshots, high-resolution snapshots, screen shots directly to Gimp, and nothing seems to come out detailed enough. I've been to shops where I can zoom in on a vendor and see super-fine detail, but mine all end up rather blurry upon a zoom (they're fine at distance.) My average "photo" (usually via screen shot) ends up being around 360x170 (HxW). Is this too small? After reading the thread on texture size, I am reluctant to use something like 1024x1000, as I've been to shops where I have to stand and wait for vendor pics to load, and I despise it. Is that my only recourse, and I should stop crying, or is there a trick that I don't know?

Oryx

The higher the resolution you use, the finer the pic will be. 1024 (long edge) will give you much better resolution, and yes, you'll have to wait for it. 512 is a good compromise, but you will get pixelization up close.

Oryx, the sizes you are mentioning are not standard dimensions that SL will recognize. Never use 1024x1024 for the purpose you are describing. 512x512, 512x256, and 256x256 pixels are typical image sizes that SL deals well with. If you have an odd size like 360x170 pixels then you must frame it in an image that is 512x256 pixels before uploading it. Part of the blur you are seeing is the poor interpolation that SL must do to your odd sized images to resize them to dimensions it understands.

Vendors are EVIL, unless you absolutely have to have them for split payments or other types of special circumstances. I've never heard of a vendor that preloads images, so customers will need to scroll through them all manually, and each one will need to resolve before it can bee seen. Instead, place your items for sale in the contents of separate prim boxes and place your ad images on the outside of the boxes. That way the images will automatically load when people are in the general area.

Right. To summarize (and get back on topic ):

- make your pics larger, but not ridiculously large
- always resize to powers of 2 (128, 256, 512, 1024) in both dimensions *before* uploading. Based on the info in your post I suspect that's your biggest problem.

Other things that help:

- Any decent editor will do a better job of shrinking a pic than the SL client will. So use "snaphot to disc" at the highest quality and resolution, crop and resize the results in your editor of choice, then upload afterward. Be aware that many editors have a choice of algorithms used for resizing; go through the program's preferences and choose the one that is "high quality" as opposed to "fast".

- In your graphics card settings, consider turning up anti-aliasing (and, to a lesser degree, anisotropic filtering) for even smoother results and less jaggies around the edges. If your computer can't run SL smoothly with these settings turned up, just do it for screenshot sessions then change them back.

aside from anti's excellent tips, hold down ctrl+shift+d to enable debug mode, then click the Client menu, and select the fourth option down (hi-res snapshots).

personally i run sl in 1280x1024 full screen mode, with anti-aliasing enabled and all object quality sliders maxed out. this provides for excellent quality snapshots, but you need a top end graphics card to play sl at these settings.

cool thanks... i suspect my problem is mostly the weird sizes that i've been using. I'll try the other hints too.


(BTW I'm not using a 'vendor' so to speak; i'm using boxes with contents... i just don't know what to call them! )

I think "buy boxes" is the word you're looking for.

NICE! The sizing of the pics in multiples of 128 worked perfectly... thanks guys. I don't know why that never occurred to me.