Fixing Fisheye in the Second Life Viewer
One thing I’ve noticed on a lot of blogs and in a lot of ads is the Second Life fisheye lens effect. This occurs when you use the mouse wheel, alt+zoom. or use the key combinations to zoom into your character to take closeups. Other than by knowing the techniques briefly presented in this somewhat cryptic SL Wiki entry regarding camera controls, as far as I know, the methods I mentioniond are pretty much the only way that most people know how to zoom in on their avatars. It was the only way I knew as well until a few months back when Roslin Petion of Tete a Pied clued me in to an arcane key combination that compensates for the warping effect. I’m sure there is a large group of others out there know about this, but I want to give credit to Roslin who told me about it.
So, on we go to the semi-secret method. It turns out that the Ctrl key in combination with 8, 9, and 0 do a sort of compensated zoom which the wiki refers to as changing the field of view (FOV).
Here are the relevant key combinations:
- Ctl+8 zooms out
- Ctl+9 returns the camera to normal perspective
- Ctl+0 zooms in with compensation (which makes the difference for closeups)
Below is the same picture taken with both methods. First is the regular old mouse-wheel zoom. Second is using the corrective zoom.
Fisheye Using Mouse Zoom
Non-Fisheye Using Ctl+0 Zoom
I personally think the difference is fairly striking between the two methods. I also think it’s fairly useful for people in fashion, hair, and especially skins to get good closeups that accurately represent what things will look like.
I love it when people chime in with their comments and other secret methods, so please do! I also have a few other questions, such as … was I the last person to find out about this, or is it news to you? And finally, was it useful?
Aww, thanks for the mention. I’m surprised that you remembered who told you! CJ and I discovered it by accident btw. We were doing test shots of close ups in a very methodical way and noticed that the shots with +0 looked so much better. It was my photo genius friend Charron that let me in on the why. It’s no voo doo, it’s the SL equivalent to what RL photographers accomplish with different photo lenses.
Roslin Petion | Apr 26, 23:11 | #Thank you so much! I’m fairly new and I thought I was missing something (doing it wrong). The fisheye affect has been frustrating me.
Casandra Shilova | Apr 27, 19:45 | #I’m so thrilled there is a solution to this ugly pictures problem. Can’t wait to try it out and redo all my pictures :-)
Thanks for posting it!!!
All this time I didn’t even know I had fisheye. Now I’m afraid my head looks really weird to everyone else! Thanks for the tip though, otherwise I never would have known.
Madison Carnot | Jun 1, 11:50 | #commenting closed for this article