Jaggies in the snapshots! How to avoid them?

Hello people,

Im trying to work as a photographer but I found one great problem in my process.

First of all, I want to shot the models in a white background to post-process all the pictures in Photoshop.

I shot the avatars in the pose pads with the snapshot resolution of 1600x1200. But even using this high-res resolution, I still getting a lot of jaggies in the BMP generated.

I don't know if I can avoid them directly in the SL or I need to work on them in the Photoshop.

Oh, just for reminding: jaggies is that "square details" that appears in the edges of the avatars. Where the edge should be FLAT ( like ----------- ) it appears some "squares" or "pixels" (like /\/\/\/\/\/\).

Thanks

Are the jaggies visible on screen? Usually this is dependant on two things, the quality of the video card and its settings. The fastest, most expensive video card made will not look much better than a $50 Nvidia 5600 with the standard SL settings, you need to delve into the AA and AF settings on the video card itself. With model photography, turn them up as high as they will go without totally freezing SL. You don't need good movement to take still photos but you still need some to move the camera. Drop draw distance to minimum as well as tree detail and such, turn off stuff you don't need until you are done taking pics.

hit Ctrl-Alt-D, this enables the debug menu of the SL client. Then go under "Client" on the menu, and check the option "High Resoltion Snapshots to Disk".

Then any "Snapshot to Disk" pictures you take will be I think double the resolution of your screen. You can then resize them down to lose the jaggies.

I think Kathmandu has the right suggestion. The snapshot should be taken from the video card's frame buffer. What this means is that any processing the video card does should show up in the snapshot. The jaggies (aliasing in CG jargon) can be reduced or eliminated by turning up the Anti-Aliasing (AA) of your video card. It will reduce the performance of SL, but if you just have it turned up when you are doing shoots it should be acceptable.

Give increased AA a try and see if that works for you.

The snapshot process used to be that way but the new setup allows you to define whatever resolution you want basically. You do want to have the highest resolution that is reasonable to work with.

I have to disagree. I usually run my client at 1920x1080, on my main monitor. If I take a snapshot at 512x512, it's pretty crisp. Now the other day I opened a second window on my secondary monitor at 1280x1024. A snapshot at 512x512 that I took was noticably degraded in it's resolution. The resolution you specifiy from the snapshot function is the size of your shot, not the resolution of the image. But yes, I agree antialias will do wonders as well.

Size and resolution in computer art is roughly the same thing. A computer monitor only displays 72 dots per inch and 72dpi is your resolution. The resolution on the monitor cannot change so if you set your resolution of an image to 200 dpi, the result is a larger picture on the monitor. A 512x512 picture at 200dpi is the exact same thing as a 1024x1024 at 100dpi. Taking a 1024x1024 72dpi and resizing it to 512x512 72dip works well because the computer simply removes information. Going from 512x512 72dpi tp 1024x1024 72dpi becomes problematic because the computer has to guess what color pixels to use to fill in the missing pixels.

If I take a screencapture of my 1920x1080 desktop and crop a 512x512 section out of it then resize my desktop to 1024x786 and screencapture and crop the same 512x512 area and compare them I will see the 1024x768 section is larger appearing because it has less information and you would actually have to raise the resolution on the 1024x768 to get the objects in the picture to appear the same size as the 1920x1080 and because of interpolation the quality of the picture is made worse. "High-rez snapshot" in the client settings appears not to do anything since the snapshot procedure was changed. You want a 200 dpi screencap of your 1024x768 SL window? Set your custom size to 2844x1944.