Framing photos

Hi,

I am very new to SL, just started a few days ago. B&W photography is one of my hobbies. I'd like to bring in some of my photos and frame them. Anyone have a guide for doing that?


Kyushu

Firstly, get the dimensions of your photo. For example we'll say it's 800x600 pixels. Upload it to SL. Now create a box and set it's x and y dimensions to match your photo. to do this just move your decimal back untill your dimension is less than 10m. in this case it would be 8.0m x 6.0m . actually might be better to make it 0.8m x 0.6m (scaling up is often easier than scaling down. Now drag your photo from your inventory onto the top surface of your box. If the photo seems to be rotated oddly (and therefore squished) go into the texture tab of the editing window and rotate it 90 degrees one way or another. Now you have your photo, in it's correct resolution, inside SL.

A quick and easy way to make a frame for it would be (while in edit mode) hold the shift key and drag the blue arrow (the z axis) up. Now press ctrl+z and the copy you've just made should pop back to where it was. Now hold ctrl+shift and you will see some smaller white boxes at the corners of your shape. Drag one of these just a tiny bit to make that prim larger. Now go to the texture tab and set the objects texture to "none". Set it's color to whatever you want it to be. Go back to the main edit tab and look for the "hollow" option. set this to about 95. And you should be set.

If all of that made no sense, feel free to IM me in world and i'll help you with it.

It makes no sense now, but I am not logged in to try it

I'll give it a shot and let you know if I have any questions.

Thanks a lot for your help.


Kyushu

HI Kyushu,
IM me inworld and I will drop a bunch of frames I made on you. Will also show you how to use them if you still need help.

Welcome to Second Life

also for a one prim variation . . . take said cube (minus the "frame" and set it's top size to say 90 in both the x and y. Then shrink it down in the z. Lastly rotate it. Then just use the select texture tool to change the texture of all the other faces of that now flat cube.

What you will end up with is a cube with the backside and the "borders" seperate faces. And the center you had applied your picture texture to.

If you wanna send me an IM in game I'll drop you a prim setup that way and all you'll have to do is texture accordingly.

I don't know if this will help, but as an artist who sells paintings here, Instead of adding an extra prim as a frame, I create one around my piece in photoshop, then upload the framed piece as one pic. After that, just apply it to any size prim you desire.

Also consider limiting the size of your image to 512 x512 or less. Nothing worse than long rez times...

Don't forget some pictures can look even more striking without a frame

Framing in SL is naturally just like in RL. A good frame will boost an image, a bad one spoil it. Some need em', some don't. You're probably pulling faces at me for making obvious comments now, but I just thought it was woth a mention

*shuts up and goes away now*

No it's a good point Erin.

Some of my photos are B&W and I think they will look best with a frame and matte layers both, so I'm going to experiment with that.


Kyushu

This has nothing to do with framing. But I find the JPEG compression really breaks up a nice photo. To resolve this, split the said photo into 4 equal pieces with as high a resolution as possible and upload them as 4 separate textures. Then join them back as 4 prims. It should produce a much higher quality image. You can also reduce it down to 2 prims by using the cut faces of a cube that has 'cut begin and end' set at 0.375 and 0.875.

Or just save it as a BMP or TGA file. I tend to use Targa images, because they can have transparency.

Agreed - JPG is great for its intended purposes (web sites, digital cameras, etc) but for SL you should always, always, always use TGA. The SL servers are gonna compress your images once it gets there, and you have no control over how they do it, or what size file they produce, so the best you can do is send you image uncompressed in a TGA file to preserve as much quality as possible.

Also - the SL servers are going to resize your image so that its width and height, measured in pixels, are powers of two (i.e. 32, 64, 128, 256, 512). Remember, though, that proper graphics apps like PS, GIMP, PSP etc do a far better job than SL does - so you should resize your image before uploading as well.

Concrete example:
You have a landscape you want to hang in your SL home. It's 90cm high and 150cm wide in RL. A good guideline for such an image is the 128, 256, or 512 range (real-world shots of nature get away with far lower resolutions than just about anything else). The image is closer to a 2:1 ration than it it to a square - so resize it to either:
- 256x128 if it's one of many piccies in your house and you want them to load faster
or
- 512x256 is it's a center-piece and needs more detail.

It will now look distorted, but when you drop it onto a prim with the correct ratio (5x3 in this example) it will be "reverse-disorted" and look end up looking just great.

Thanks a lot, all of you

Someone hooked me up with a frame and I'm experimenting. I'll let you know if I have more questions.


Kyushu