Why is avatar height not to scale?

Thats what i got told lol so oh well. I think that is the kind of default I meant - what we are based on, but maybe i was wrong Nuno - listen to Sally here! Shes smart! She's good at helping people - just be careful she doesn't give you the music jitterbug.

I still like the fact that the one we are all based on is female. deep down inside all of the men, they are really a bunch of girlies lol.

Yep, that's Ruth. What I meant was that the "test" characters are also sometimes referred to as "default"...... sorry, was adding to the confusion I think.



/me blushes .......... (don't believe a word of it!)

/me starts spreading jitterbugs around

I already have a jive, I may as well collect a jitterbug too. Please could i have one? lol

I watched a TV movie the other day 'Different for Girls' with Rupert Graves and Stephen Mackintosh. Ruperts character launches into a monologue at one point about chromosome pairs summarising that we all start off as female and get 'bits added on' lol
Is this another case of SL following RL? Some might find this disturbing. Some may find it explains some things? Oh we need a thread of its own for this

Scripted height detectors rely on an LSL command that was originally intended to return the eye height of the avatar, so the camera could be placed at eye height for mouselook mode (first person camera view). Since there is no other scripted call that can tell how far the distance is from there to the top of the avatar's head (whether it's a default Human avatar or a furry anthro bunny with three foot long ears sticking up from their skull), the avatar height detectors also just report eye height.

Because most people don't realize this when they first create their avatars, almost everyone makes their avatars taller than they intended. New players see others towering over them, and feel like a midget if they don't also increase their height. Also, there is a visual distortion in the way that SL gives you the camera view, versus how things would look if you were looking with your eyes, that also makes thinks look "too small" if made exactly to scale.

The sliders in the Appearance controls are able to affect height with many, many of the settings. Torso length, pelvis length, leg length, just to mention some of them. Your height is based on all thise settings, and not on any one master "height" slider. A male gender choice also places a variety of multipliers on a number of the slider settings, to change the default female form to male. So none of the slider settings can be directly translated to a specific scale.

Add to this the fact that most of the time Players are NOT in Mouselook, and have their camera in the default location, above and behind their head. If the ceiling height is to scale, and room sizes are too scale, this "above and behind view" makes the room feel small and cramped.

One last factor - When you teleport into a space, you appear a meter or two above the surface, then settle to a landing. With ceilings that are to scale with real-world builds, this usually places you in conflict with the ceiling, and SL drops you on the next floor up, or on the roof.

Combine all those factors, and most Builders end up defaulting to making buildings at 1.25 to 1 scale or 1.5 to 1 scale, if trying for a realistic build. I use 1.5 to 1, which gives roughly 4.5 to 5 Meter ceiling heights, and rooms that don't feel claustrophobicly small. It also allows for most of the variety of oversized and non-Human avatars out there.

that is a good guideline. even though 5 meters is quite tall for a single story and is maybe closer to 2:1, it can still feel cramped. 4.25 is the absolute minimum i would build to, but rarely go less than 4.5. it is a challenge to get the visual design to match the large proportions. you're stuck with big rooms but you don't necessarily want it to look like it.

I can confirm when men rez they look like girls. And they are wearing odd blossomy dresses. I try not to look, coz it turns me right off. Men are all Girlie Girls!
By the way I am 5 feet 6 in real and am constantly hunting for measuring sticks here to assure myself I am in scale. I high-five Ianthe who writes earlier that short sexy overagers must stick together and not be regarded as jail bait. Anywho, I look BAD against a big meaty guy. Especially when I bring 'em down with my "street sweeper"!

It helps a bit to consider the ceiling heights in SL to be more comparable to Victorian era homes, which had a standard of 14 foot high ceilings (4.25 Meters), instead of the modern era's 8 foot height (2.46 Meters).

I am equivalent of 5' 6" in RL measurements, but SL uses a slightly smaller foot, inch and metre. So the measurements read higher but we're not bigger!

while its true the height detectors are off, Im not sure this really matters - since everyone is massively tall even by the height detector standards.


My av is 5'5 by the height detector -
Im 5'5 in real life

Everyone always comments about how short I am in SL.
IRL its just my kids who say I am short .

here here


ps: Joe and i took Voids advice regarding using a prim and figuring out your true height in sl, and we were quite surprised to find that i was well over 6' while he was close to 7'. so to Ephrim(sp), an apology, they are off by almost a foot,(rl wise) even though they measure you from ground to eye. now that we have made the adjustments to our sl heights, it will be interestign to see how our friends and family react to us inworld.

You and Claire both say that. But how do you know? Since SL is all pixels, any scale we use there has to be internally consistent, but has no bearing (that I can see) on any RL scale.

I wonder if someone of extra small stature (little people, dwarf, midget, I dont know what term is exactly correct these days???) would want to keep their actual height in SL. If they did, would they be treated with the disrespect that others that arent over 6'5 (game height) or would they be insulted and told they look like children and need to make themselves taller. I dont know about anyone else, but I can generally tell the difference between a shorter av and a child (body parts, for one thing, profiles for another). I feel short all the time and I walk around in an av that is 6'6 with heels on! lol

I got frustrated with this a while back and created a JIRA issue to have the Edit Appearance slider values reflect RL measurments (cm or inches.) Here's that link:

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-1094

The height detector says that I am 5'6"

Thanks Ceera and Parker for elaborating on the crux of the problem.


I was trying to avoid exactly this but I guess I'll just have to swallow my reservations and get on with being a Victorian giant.

And one other thing:


Dinalya, Dinalya, Dinalya ... I have met avs and avas scooting about in wheelchairs in SL because ...
Guess?
Of course!
They are wheelchair users in RL.
There's nowt so queer as folk, I tell ya.

And I've met avs scooting about in wheelchairs who were NOT wheelchair users in RL. They just thought it was fun way to get around.

Er, in the future please be sure to quote all of a relivant statement lol...there was a lot of 'wonderings' after that statement, it wasnt intended to be said as if they were odd for doing so or unheard of. The question following it was how would they be treated by choosing to stay with their RL height. Looks really bad when you just take one line out of it to reply to

I typically use 5 meters for my floor-to-floor heights just because it works nicely for two stories with the maximum prim size being 10 meters. Anything under 4.5 meters starts feeling cramped with the camera being where it is.

I wonder if putting RL measurements in the appearance editor would result in everyone eventually resizing themselves down so we're no longer a virtual world of professional basketball players.

I don't think putting real dimensions into the appearance sliders will help anything. what will it measure? Arm from wrist to shoulder? Hand from middle fingertip to wrist? Neck from collarbone to chin? Head from chin to crown? Does foot size indicate length of the foot from heel to toe, or height from heel to ankle?

Which of these do you add up to get height?

I think it would be better to have the sliders be proportions, as they are now, but to have one overall slider that adds it up for you and calculates the resulting height, and then allows you to proportionately affect ALL the sliders to adjust size and height. What they are now is a percentage value applied to the range of allowed morphing from the base 'Ruth' avatar.

I'd also like them to make it possible to reduce avatar size further, so we could have a humanoid avatar that was a six inch tall pixy, or increase it more, so we could have giants, without having to resort to prim bodies and complex animation overriders.

I'm thinking about scraping the failed builds in one of my sim and build everything at true metric scale, I already made myself an 162 cm variant of my shape , i want to see if it might convince more peoples that being so tall is completely idiotic.

join the group!

League for the normally scaled avatars

actually, 1m in RL *IS* to scale with 1m in SL.. but here's the problem... The follow camera.

In order for the "default position" of the follow camera not to "freak out" a ceilling must be roughly 5m tall. In terms of feet, let's say that a meter roughly equals a yard.. so we're looking at a 15 foot ceilling.

Now if you make a 12foot x 12foot room (4mx4m) that's a pretty generous space in the real world. But in SL, a 3m (9ft) ceilling isn't going to work. So add 2 more meters, and now it's a 15 foot ceilling. So suddenly the walls are too tall, and it looks weird. So to compensate, we make the room's walls longer. Now of course, any realistically sized furniture will be dwarfed by this room. So we must scale up the furniture, and soon the avatar gets taller.

It's a deliberate ploy to make us want more land and prims for space, and to build things that seem spacious.

People use that height detector thing because it's all over freebie places and why wouldn't they believe what a scripted prim told them?

Last I checked I was 5'8 measured by prim.

I really didn't explain what I meant well did I? lol. Im no good with explaining...concepts.
What I meant, is that although SL uses the RL measurements (100 cm to a metre) it doesn't mean the 1 metre in SL is equal to - or even in scale with - 1 metre in RL. So a 6 metre wide room, will most likely with an avvie in it, look like it has shrunk to about 4.

You really are all getting hung up on this, aren't you? WHY are you trying to justify to yourself what the 'metre' or 'foot' that you see on your soppy little monitor screens which are only as big as your belly anyway, is 'the same as' the metre or foot you use in your real homes where you live in such cramped conditions? NONE of you see us 'life-size' anyway.

Would it help if you just stopped making the conversions? This is a world. It has a measuring system - call it 'linear lindens' and 'square lindens' and 'cubic lindens' if it helps. NEVER convert them to feet or metres. You will be much happier.

(After all, there's no exchange. It's not like money. You can't exchange land between here and your 'real life' nor can you exchange body measurments. No chance!).

(Oh I see, it's inflation. You keep trying to get bigger than each other so the value of your distances decreases. Hmm. Solve it by issuing measurements after deflation in 'real terms' ha. )