Saturday, December 11, 2010

Like an Ad for Sunglasses

Long ago, I read some advice in the context of SL fashion photography, though I believe it's generally applicable: take your photos in high resolution. I don't remember and never linked to the page recommending that, but here are some web pages of people who agree:

Unfortunately, following this good advice will now make you fall afoul of an SL client bug, VWR-7672... and here are the results:


The strange reverse silhouette is expected, an effect of the Windlight setting. The bug is the darkening of the top portion of the image. If the boundary were curved, it would be like a bad commercial for sunglasses, or a commercial for bad sunglasses.

It's not just horizontal:


And it's not just along one axis, or even just once along each axis:


Needless to say, this is highly frustrating, and is not doing at all well by SL photographers. I hope you'll consider voting for
VWR-7672.

P.S. Especially now that it's been pointed out, you'll see it in photos I've put up in the relatively recent past.

UPDATE: Experimentation seems to show that the culprit is the "global illumination" setting, or more accurately, turning it on provokes the bug.



UPDATE: Even more accurately--the global illumination code seems to be written to work with the size of the SL client window. If you specify a photo larger than that, you see the effect on the photo. To check progress on this issue, take a look at VWR-24178.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Maybe its just certain types of video cards, snapshots taken with my eVGA GeForce GTX460 doesn't do that, and I'm using the latest drivers.

It also could be because of Linux

Anonymous said...

Oh, and I was about to ask you why your images looked like they were spliced together.

Melissa Yeuxdoux said...

I've never spliced images together--though it would be fun to take pictures in SL and try one of those programs that does splice them together to get a huge panorama.

Also, I don't think it's Linux; if you look at the JIRA entry, some of the people reporting the problem are running XP and Vista.

Anonymous said...

I tried doing the "Hi Res Snapshots" like some of the others suggest, both in Phoenix 1.5.2.725 and the LL Beta 2.4 client, and I don't seem to have that problem. Also, Setting it to "hi res snapshot" gets the same file size as not setting it.

Melissa Yeuxdoux said...

I use "custom" and set the resolution explicitly.

Watson aName said...

I adore the photo. I calculate the weight of each breast using the formula
0.5236 x diameter cubed
Where diameter is in centimeters. I assumed 16 inches or 40 centimeters.
I got 33 liters or 30 kg or 66 pounds.
That's one helluva huge boob! Thanks!