Hints & Tips: Taking great photos of your avatar

Thanks to Marnix for sparking the idea for this post. In his post, Smooth Threads, he asked:

… and how do I get rid of those annoying jagged edges to clothing, particular trousers (pants, if you’re North American?)

I replied in a comment, but I thought a more detailed and illustrated version might be in order, hence this post. If your pics of your avatar always look like the one on the left (below) and you want them to look like the one on the right, then hop behind the cut to find out some tips and tricks:

Walk this way!

OK, the first thing you need to do is make, buy, borrow or somehow lay your hands on a well-lit (not over-lit, mind you) photobooth where you can take your pics. For those feeling lazy (*g*) I’ve just put a full skybox with lit photobooth up for 50L$ at my stall in Baileya (and it’ll go on my Xstreet SL page as soon as I can get the page written out, and this blog post is made so I can link to it there) –

– or if you’re feeling industrious you can follow my tutorial for making a private skybox and then repeat it inside the skybox to make a photobooth. Use the ‘cut’ option to cut away one wall and then set the texture to ‘blank’ and check the full bright option. Add some prims with the light feature attached (set the intensity to 0.5 otherwise you’ll overdo it) and move them around your avatar until you’re well-lit (take off your facelights; remember that your SL viewer can only handle 6 local lights at one time!)

This is a good pattern for your light prims. Once you have them in a rough pattern like this, set them all to phantom (or flexible – either will do, just as long as you can walk through them) and then use the Default Transparent Texture in your inventory library folder to make them invisible.

OK, now going back to the photobooth, why did I tell you to check the ‘full bright’ box after you set the texture to white? Because this is what it looks like without full bright:

Perfectly okay if you actually want some shadows, but if you want a nice crisp white (or solid-coloured) background then you need to check the full bright option, which will give you this:

You can play around with other settings, too. Try adding some shininess or bump-mapping, with and without full bright. Try different colours and textures, too! The picture below is just plain white with shiny added:

Now, my secret graphics settings! If you don’t see all of these options, make sure you have that little ‘custom’ box (top-right) checked:

NOTE: I have a pretty powerful computer, therefore I can run in ‘Ultra’ setting without too much problem. Since you’re standing still, you might be able to as well, but please don’t overtax your computer. If your graphics card starts chugging away, pull the settings down a bit.

OK, now since I’m inside, in a skybox, I can pull draw distance as low as it will go. I don’t need particles, trees, terrain or sky, so those are all zero. I’ve unchecked Water Reflections (big performance hit, that, and there’s no water in my skybox) and I’ve also unchecked Avatar Cloth (mainly because it makes pant cuffs move more naturally, which is annoying when you’re trying to take a still photo!)

So we’re all set to take our pic, but where’s the magic trick that will get rid of those jagged edges? Well, it’s very simple, but there’s a trade-off. You get great pics, but they take up a LOT more hard drive space. What we’re going to do is toggle the Advanced Menu on (CTRL & ALT & D) and then check ‘High-res Snapshot’:

NOTE: This will only work when you are saving snapshots to disk. It won’t work for uploading snapshots in-world!

Same image. The first taken at normal resolution, the second taken at high resolution. The difference in file size? About 8MB…

If you have the hard drive space, then you’re good to go. If not, then once you’ve resized a few photos at a time and saved them in JPG or PNG format, then you can delete your older, huge files.

To give you an example of the size difference, here is one shot taken at both resolutions and viewed at 100% size in Paint Shop Pro. The first is at normal resolution:

The second is at high resolution, and again viewed at 100% size:

So when you’ve taken your pics, you need to resize them down in whatever graphics program you prefer. You’ll find that when you’ve done so, those jagged lines that you get at normal resolution are pretty much gone in the resized high resolution shots.

I’ve sized normal resolution and high resolution shots to the same visual size (give or take a few pixels here and there) and you can clearly see the difference. Perhaps the most visible difference is in the full-length shot:

Face close-up. Note how the finer details of hair, the edge of the face, where the lips touch etc, are jagged in the normal res pic on the left, but smoother in the resized high res pic on the right:

You’ll notice it most in the finer details, such as hair:

Now go forth and take fabulous pics!

EDIT: Some extra tips coming in from readers – check the comments section for those!