Quick Icons for IMVU products

How to create a product icon with a minimum of tools.

IMVU product icons are required to be 100 pixels across by 80 pixels high. There is also a file size limit. Supported formats are believed to be GIF, JPEG and PNG.

Formats:

	GIF: The only format to support animation. GIF works best for images with a limited palette, and is not so good for images with shadows and lighting.
	JPEG: This format was intended for photographic images. There may be a choice of quality allowing a trade-off between quality and file size.
	PNG: This format appears to be preferred by IMVU. In some ways it supersedes GIF, although I do not believe it supports animation.

Tools:

	Windows PAINT: I am recommending Paint because if you know how to use a more complex editor you don't need this tutorial.
	IMVU Client: The first step is obtaining an image of your product, and generally you will do this within IMVU.

Getting the product image

Using the IMVU camera

IMVU Window in camera mode

Take an IMVU snapshot with your product in the center and zoomed to a usefull size. Generally you want it to fill the middle third of the image, approximately.

IMVU Album page

Look up the image in your IMVU album

Save the image somewhere you can find. Note that IMVU album images have cryptic filenames, you might want to assign a meaningful name.

Load the image into paint

Using the "Print Screen" function

Arrange the IMVU screen so the product is in the middle as with the snapshot method.

Press "Prt Scr".

Load Paint

Select "Paste" to get the screen image into Paint

Press escape to clear the selection

Use the scrollbars to get the product image on screen

Select the IMVU display area, trimming off the borders

Select "Copy"

Select "New" and discard changes

Select "Paste"

Resizing the image in "Paint"

The image resize function in Paint scales the image according to a percentage.

If you used the Album method with a recent version of imvu then you will have an image that is 1024 by 751 pixels.

If you used the Album method and saved the product icon you will probably have an image that is 300 by 220 pixels

If you used the Print Screen method the image size may vary depending on how large your selection was.

If you want to resize from 1024 by 751 to 100 by 80 then divide the heights: 80/751=0.106 or 11% (rounded UP)

Rescale the image to 11% of its size and you get an image that is 113 by 83.

Using the "Attributes" function reset the size to 100 by 80.

Save the image in "PNG" format.