Feedback / Suggestion

[xIITaylorIIx]

Would be really nice if SL would implement a tool to make high resolution snapshots of ONLY the avatar, without the entire background. It takes hours of work to master the pen tool in photoshop, especially around the hair. I have tried all other suggestions with making a plane in 1 colour and then erasing in photoshop but unfortunately the colour remains between the fine hair

[Freya Mokusei]

I appreciate the difficulty in this task (and of course, I remember responding to you yesterday on a related topic, hi!).

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xIITaylorIIx wrote:

unfortunately the colour remains between the fine hair

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Any tool that was added to a viewer with this purpose, would suffer with the same problem. Alpha textures cannot be easily analysed by computers when applied to 3D surfaces (see also, alpha sorting), even raytracing can't do it consistantly (and in SL, it can't be done at all). Another issue, of course, is anti-aliasing - the background surface influences the colour of the partially-filled blur pixels surrounding the frame of the body. Such blur would not be removable without removing the AA effect (at a cost to render quality).

It's not just a problem for human artists.

[xIITaylorIIx]

Hello again Freya ... well all I can say is that other 3D games have this. One simple click and you have a 2048 x 2048 high resolution avatar with proverbial "hair sharp" edging

[Amethyst Jetaime]

I'm betting all those other games have avatars that are 100 percent mesh and backgrounds that remain static in the sense that any particular location always looks the same other than maybe having other avatars there.

SL has flexi prim hair and prim, sculpt and mesh body attachments that are separate from the avatar and backgrounds that change all the time as people add and subtract content. I am not a programmer but I think it would be almost impossible for a computer to just pick out one avatar in this kind of environment and render it and all of its attachments in high def.

I know that in GIMP you can render a background transparent pretty accurately if you took the pic in front of a solid color screen set to full bright, but there is still a bit of hazing on the edges.  You can clean it up by selecting the avatar and 'shrinking' the image by a pixel or two to eliminate the hazing.  You can then add a new background if you want one and use the water drop tool set at a few pixels large to blend the edges back into the background.  I would imagine that photoshop has similar tools, but I don't use it.  I use the pro version of Corel or Gimp depending on what i am doing.

[xIITaylorIIx]

Yes, that's very possible ... I really don't know how behind the scenes work ... and really also don't want to since its too technical for me at times but I did talk to a programmer who knows SL and he says that it shouldn't be such a huge problem. I told him to get in contact with LL. Maybe something could become of it and we can profit

[Jean Horten]

You have been ofered a  very good suggestion how to  get what you want, but  you're not willing to take it into consideration as it is  "too technical" for you, very interresting point of view.

Gimp/Photoshop are more complex than  paint, so either learn it or leave it,  life isn't always a bowl of cherries.....

J.

[Coby Foden]

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xIITaylorIIx wrote:

It takes hours of work to master the pen tool in photoshop, especially around the hair. I have tried all other suggestions with making a plane in 1 colour and then erasing in photoshop but unfortunately the colour remains between the fine hair

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Did you try this Photoshop plugin what I suggested earlier in the other thread?

Plugin here

I made a new snapshot with whispy hair to see how the plugin handles it.

As you can see the extraction is pretty perfect. No green backround even between the fine hairs.

This is one of the most easiest and fastest way to get the extraction job done well.

With the pen tool it is rather impossible to get the same result on whispy hair.

Left: Snapshot in SL against full bright dark green background

(full bright because then the background is even green colour and the ambient light has no effect on it)

Middle: Avatar extracted from the background with the Photoshop plugin

Right: In Photoshop I dropped random picture as a new background. I tried many and all look great.

 

There is even a video showing how it works.  I want to stress: Easy, Fast, Excellent result

 PS. In youtube one can watch this in full HD (1080p).

(EDIT: Corrected some typos) :matte-motes-tongue:

[Coby Foden]

One more extraction example from green background with Easy Green Screen plugin for Photoshop.

Easy, fast, excellent.

( I think I already said that.) :smileyvery-happy:

[xIITaylorIIx]

@Jean Horton: No, life isen't always a bowl of cherries and obviously you didn't get any cherries either today. I have been studying 8 years and have 12 1/2 to go. As you can imagine, time is of the essence to me ... so no, I won't walk 10 miles if someone is friendly enough to drive me!

Thx a lot to the others and Coby, great stuff, this is exactly what I need, thank you so much ... saves a lot of time Highly appreciated.