Snapshot aspect ratio off?

I have noticed recently that when I take snapshots, the aspect ratio and apparently the pixel count in each direction seems to be off in strange ways.

For example, I would expect that if I have SL running in a 1024 x 768 window, which has never been streached or re-sized, that the snapshots should have roughly a 5 to 4 aspect ratio. Yet I have had them come in square; or about the height of the window but only half the width, and streached top to bottom; or still half the width, but only 1/4 the window height, and badly squashed top to bottom... the overall size that I get seems entirely random. The dimension that is lacking has lost resolution. If I streach it to the right shape, you can see image losses.

I am on a Mac Mini, running OSX 10.3.9. The built-in video card only has 32 MB VRAM, which I realize is marginal. But my snapshots used to have the same aspect ratio as my screen... Again, SL is running in a 1024 - 768 window, and the monitor itself is set to a larger size with a smilar aspect ratio.

I know it isn't just me. A friend and I were taking pics of each other yesterday, and hers that she sent to me were off as well.

Called live help in-world last night, and they were stumped. Will call customer service and file a bug report today at lunch time.

PS : Haven't done a thorough check, but I believe similar randomness is happening on texture imports. I would expect imported textures to either match the imported .tga file's pixel aspect ratio, or to come in as square. But it doesn't always do that, as I recall.

As in "using an aspect ratio pulled out of thin air"?

Twas always thus.

I was playing with this last night.

I think that regardless of the dimensions of a texture, SL automatically converts the image to the nearest 1:1 ratio, particularly 512x512 and 256x256. I think this is a component in ensuring that you can't take a snapshot that doesn't conform to the upload/texture requirements.

I noticed it when I made an elongated portrait of my lover and she came out looking a bit...chunky. I resized it to a perfect square and lo, problem resolved.

Since it's a capture, not a render, a screenshot maintains any clarity you had. My 16x antialiasing and anistropic filtering and 1600x1200 resolution are very evident in all my shots, but the Aspect Ratio is always a bit off unless I cook a border for it. Of course, i can turn all my eye candy off and the textures stay picture perfect.

In world textures (and snaphots; which are stored as textures) don't have to be square, but the width and height must each be a power of 2 greater or equal to 16 (or possibly 32, I can't remember for certain). Forgotten whether they're resized to the nearest or always reduced though.

Oh, if it's happening to snapshots saved to disk that is a bug - AFAIK it's just meant to dump the video buffer for that.

Snapshots saved to disk are working fine. Snapshots saved in-world are what is screwing up.

Then there's actually no new problem here (unless it used to save the aspect ratio, but I don't remember it ever doing that). You could put in a feature request for the aspect ratio to be saved for snapshots and the viewing window resized automatically if you want, otherwise you have to stretch it manually to the right aspect.

OK. Perhaps it's just that I usually saved to disk, rather than spending Lindens on in-world saved pics. I'm used to save to disk retaining the right aspects.

Guess I'll put in a feature request...

BTW, switching to fullscreen to take pictures will give you in world snapshots that are the correct aspect.

Thanks for the tip! I'll try that next time.

Err, doesn't work for me. They're ALWAYS either too wide or too tall, whether they were saved to disk before uploading or snapped directly to game. There don't seem to be missing pixels or anything, but opening them from a notecard or inventory they always look wrong.

That's interesting, maybe the size restrictions aren't simply powers of two...

What resolution are you using?

Hang on... I think I'm doing my sums wrong...

Ignore what I said about fullscreen, it's BS.

<insert lame excuse for not thinking the numbers through properly here >

Thanks for pointing out my folly Argent. Oh, and the images are resampled when they're uploaded - whether this is 'missing' pixels or not is a language thing, but there's certainly less of them.

First time I did this--click SNAPSHOT then SAVE TEXTURE AS, I wondered why my picture appeared so squished. At a 1024 x 768 resolution but in windowed mode, so my taskbar takes up some pixels, I found that it'll use the maximum size of each dimension and round to a power of 2... so this gave me a 1024 x 512 texture, which was very strange.

Like this (image size is 1/4 of the original):



For best possible quality, I do recommend saving snapshots to disk. You can always mod and ruinate them later if you want, but as has been alluded to here, lost pixels are GONE!

There's also a "cheat" of sorts. If you have DEBUG on and check HIGH-RES SNAPSHOT, it takes some extra time (a lot, if you're on a slower computer), but Save As Texture will always give you a 1024 x 1024 shot--which is the maximum allowable texture size, regardless of your actual screen resolution.

Happy snapping! =)

This *always* disconnects me and *usually* crashes my client and trashes my cache... and I don't get a texture. I saved to disk and still crashed... but I got an image WAY bigger than 1024x1024 on disk... it looked like at least twice those dimensions, maybe more. Since my screen is over 1024 wide, it may be rounding up to 2048x2048. It's incomplete but it's AMAZING the detail I saw in what was left.

The best way I've found to get textures that match my screen view is to get to where I'm going to take the picture... and log out, and get the "final snapshot" image out of my profile. Since I'm going to get disconnected anyway, I might as well save my cache.

I haven't tried downloading one again to see if they're actually resampled or not, but I'll take your word for it. In game, of course, they're ALWAYS resampled in EVERY shot.

Yes, all views re-sample in real time, in-world, when textures are in use. But if a texture only has just so many pixels, you hit a finite limit on how much detail you see clearly when you zoom in.

I made some textures for wood plank floors, with photographic-quality textures. I carefully uploaded them as 512 x 256 textures, and this worked. The aspect ratio was fine, and I can zoom in and see amazing detail. But if a texture is badly resampled when it is saved or uploaded, you get smeared messes. Looks passable at a distance, but not up close.

I would like to thank everyone for the feedback. I understand what is happening much better now. This has been very helpful to me in terms of maintaining high quality for my own texturing work.