Pictures

Pictures

Option-Return or Option-S (on Windows Alt-S, since Alt-Return never reaches a mod there), or Take a picture on the mod's page, while the studio is open.

• The picture is drawn afresh for itself, by the same cameras that draw the screen, at the Size asked for: the screen's, or two, three or four times as wide and high (at most 8192 pixels on its longer side, and with the edges smoothed by multisampling). So the game's interface, the settings window and the studio's own hints are never in it.
• It is saved as a PNG in the game's own Screenshots folder (beside GameData), named after the craft, the studio and the time: Kerbal X - white studio - 2026-10-09 14-31-07.png.
• Taking one stops the game for a moment: here a picture twice the screen's size (2560 by 1440) took a fifth of a second, one four times the screen's size (5120 by 2880) two thirds of a second, and a see-through one that size a little over a second.

The turntable's loop (since 0.2.0)

Turntable loop on the mod's page, while the studio is open: the craft is turned once round in 36 steps, a tenth of a turn each, and a picture taken of each (640 pixels wide at the most, half the screen's width, its edges smoothed), then written into the game's Screenshots folder as a GIF that loops for ever, three seconds round (twelve and a half frames a second): for a mod's page, a forum post or a message. The pictures are taken a frame apart, so the loop is made in about a second and a half; the GIF is written on another thread, the game going on meanwhile, and the studio says when it is saved.

A GIF holds 256 colours. One palette serves every frame, chosen from all of them by the median cut (the colours there are, split again and again where they spread widest, each part's mean kept), so nothing changes colour from frame to frame; each pixel is put to the nearest of them with a fixed four-by-four pattern of small offsets added first (ordered dithering), so a backdrop's smooth gradient keeps no bands and the pattern stands still from frame to frame, where error diffusion would crawl. Tried outside the game on made-up frames (36 of 320 by 180: written in a fifth of a second; all 36 read back by ffmpeg, the right way up and in order). In the game (2026-10-18, the AI Trainer in the white studio, the screen 1280 by 720): saved a second after Turntable loop was pressed, 640 by 360, 453 KB; ffprobe read all 36 frames at twelve and a half a second, the craft turning evenly once round and the white backdrop without bands.

See-through background

With See-through background on, in the white studio and before the green screen, the picture has no background at all: only the craft (and, in the white studio, its shadow, as a see-through shade), for laying over anything in a picture editor.

How: the craft is drawn twice more, over black and over white, with the backdrop hidden and without the game's post-processing. Where the two pictures are the same, the craft is solid; where they differ by all of it, there is nothing; in between (the soft edge of a part, a window, the shadow) it is that much see-through. Its colour is what it is over black, divided by how solid it is. This needs nothing from the parts' own shaders (which do not all write a usable transparency), and gives soft edges, glass and the shadow their true transparency, with no fringe of the backdrop's colour round the craft: which is what a green screen is for, done without the keying.

The showroom's pictures always keep their background: its floor's reflection belongs to the picture.