Full Screen Preview ‘Matrix Effect’

Co-belgian-SL-hottie Bella March discovered an - until now - undocument SL-photography/snapshotting feature concerning the full screen preview and baptized it ‘the Matrix Effect’. (When are they going to name features after me?!! *grins*)

When the freeze-frame pictures appears, the ALT-ZOOM functions used during normal viewer operation, remain active and functional. This means you can freeze the action by activating the snapshot function and then you can at your own pace, zoom - rotate - pan using the regular techniques. This is so amazing and it gives you endless opportunities. While Alt-zooming part of the hidden UI reappears and after releasing the mouse, the viewer composes a new snapshots according to your snapshot-options. You can change as long as you want, 90% of the objects remain frozen, giving you enough time to look for that special angle or to cover annoying artifacts by moving the camera position. (From Discussing Matrix effect while taking snapshots.)

You can still only save the photograph once, though. So choose wisely! ;)

And of course, as Bella knows about the strange forced called ‘machinima’, the video tutorial on the ‘Matrix Effect’:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVVQr_CKUfE]

No Related Posts

3 Responses to “Full Screen Preview ‘Matrix Effect’”

Bella March wrote a comment on April 10, 2007

It’s an honour to see that I could actually teach something new to a professional like Torley.

From Loki’s comment (on my blog), this seems to be a feature that has been introduced a couple of months ago, but was put optional due to complaints from (I guess) beta-testers.

Or is it a bug that became a feature ? Ah, programmers …

Loki Popinjay wrote a comment on April 10, 2007

I’m surprised Torley doesn’t remember the whole hoopla in July last year over the changed snapshot interface. Basically what LL changed was that that when you took a snapshot the screen froze and you could move around in the frozen scene just as Bella describes. although in certain situations this can be very handy, in just as many situations it’s a huge pain in the ass. Especially when snapshotting because you loose touch with what is happening around you. So, two updates later the feature was thankfully degraded from default to option. I have to admit that even though I knew about it I never used it once since then.

I did a bit of digging and found this in the release notes:

Release 1.11.0(9) July 19, 2006

* Improved Snapshot functionality
o When taking a snapshot, the world will freeze in place and the snapshot will be previewed over the entire screen (but under UI elements)
o The camera tool will be active by default, allowing you to click and drag to move the camera around while objects/avatars/etc are frozen in place, without having to hold down ALT
o You can also change snapshot parameters (resolution, JPEG compression level) and the snapshot will update on the fly
o Any time the camera moves or a parameter is changed, the existing snapshot will “drop” away and be replaced by a new one

Release 1.12.0(10) August 18, 2006

“Freeze Frame” toggle added to snapshots
* Remove checkbox to restore old snapshot behavior

More info and reactions: http://forums.secondlife.com/showthread.php?t=122551

Vint Falken wrote a comment on April 11, 2007