Question about avatar height.

Yes. They totally hosed it.

But the whole of RL exists on Google Earth - I don't know how many discs that takes up!!!

Google Earth is distributed over data centers hundreds of miles apart!

When men get too big they dont look right on sex balls. Nothing fits and I look like I'm at the end of a popsicle when I'm doing something "naughty"

You can get my height meter if you want to have a very accurate measure of your height.

Its a freebie both in my shop, on slapt.me, xstreet, and at Sarah Nerds.

It will tell you in feet and cm, and resize itself to the value it spits out so you can stand in it and be sure its correct - and if you don't trust that, edit it while its resized and read its z-value.

Agreed, and I put out my height meter and my free shape as counter measures to this.

If you travel the grid, slowly but surely you'll start noticing more and more people are lowering their height down so it reads a number that matches what they intend as their height - ie: they want a 5'6" person, they make an actual 5'6".

But there's still a lot of frankenbarbies out there that are oversized giants.

The internal walls of my skybox were designed to be more like a dollhouse than a real house for this reason.

This same camera problem exists in all 3D worlds - go into an MMO and you'll see the problem there too. As a result, walls tend to be higher and rooms more spacious than reality.

Like a dollhouse, you build it in a way that allows easy manipulation of the dolls inside from someone who is actually on the outside.

I have included an accurate "Prim Height" AV Ruler HUD in the Avatar Proportion Kit at the Forum Cartel Hangout.

The HUD gives your height in Imperial or Metric as well as the height of those nearest to you (within 60m).

It is a great way to see how the world around you is full of giants.

If anyone needs it, just IM me or pick it up at the Forum Cartel freebie section inside the Avatar Proportion Kit.

I understand that. It's a fact of virtual life and I'm not complaining about it. Without stating the obvious, I don't understand why 'real' height is such a goal in SL. There is of course the convenience of not having to adjust the dimensions of real items on their virtual facsimiles but otherwise realistic dimensions are a square peg in the round hole of the technology itself.

Your doll's house analogy sums it up. I wish it were otherwise because my building style and tastes very much draw from real architecture and design but there are too many problems with small.

Because if everyone is a giant, then nobody can be a giant.

Because the avatar mesh messes up at extremes, so giants look deformed.

Because people do weird things to get bigger than the giants, and that makes them more deformed.

Because the bigger everything's built, the less space you have on the grid.

I've tried to make G8 as close as possible to RL me, so when I did the old rez-a-cube measuring trick I was quite surprised to find I was 6'3" (slider's at 46, by the way). That's a full 8" taller than my RL height. However, no way am I going shorter than that. A lot of people tower over me as it is, and most furniture makes me look like Dennis Waterman in 'Little Britain'.

This is one of the reasons the grid remains gigantic. Mostly men, who do not want to be shorter than 99% of the rest of the men on the grid. Generally, unless talking realistic sizes, most men do not size themselves smaller than 7'0 to 7'3" for male pride purposes...it is the "I am smaller than all the other guys!" syndrome which really shouldn't matter seeing how the gross majority of those guys are ALL out of proportion in the most unattractive ways.

Save a prim, be a tiny.

A height of 6' 6" or even 7' isn't a giant in a world where the default height is 6' 6". Hell, it's just 'very tall' in RL. Being a giant in SL is a job for attachments and special AOs, just like being a tiny.


The avatar mesh messes up every which way I can think of: only moderate repositioning of the skeleton in animations screws it up. As for shapes, if you want even an anatomically accurate human form in SL, you are on a hiding to nothing.


Agreed but ditto my comment about tinies above.


I don't see any need for economy of space in SL: there's far too much empty space as it is. Primitives are the real issue and even the smallest builds may require a bucket load of prims to look right.

The glandular disturbances you get when you push the sliders up very far are like the difference between "does this make my butt look big?" and the elephant man.

Try building a house and garden in a 512 square meter space. A first land parcel is about the same size as a typical suburban lot... yes, really. If you build a house scaled to fit in that lot you're lucky if you end up with a summer cabin. Even with all the camera issues, a realistically scaled avatar does not need rooms as big as a seven footer.

And, well, no, I don't think there is enough empty space in SL. There's lots of wasted space, perhaps, but it's wasted on random bits of incomplete builds.

So you start with a summer cabin and acquire more land as your suburban aspirations grow.

The problem I have there is not lack of space, it's lack of prims.

Even if my avatars were a foot or two shorter, my buildings would be the same size I make 'em now.

My personal opinion is that there is too much distress placed on human avatar size.

Make your avatar look how you want it and allow everyone else to do the same. I have to scale down most every piece of furniture I buy and scale up all my skirts. It is just what I do to make things fit me. I do not see that it is anything to get all bent out of shape over.

Or don't build oversize and save real money in the process.

Even with double prims, you can't fit a two-room bungalow on a 512. I've got three bedrooms and a garden in that space in RL.

My skybox arguably has 5 rooms and fits in a 512 - and they're all spacious. But its 3 stories tall too.

You can fit it - you just have to work it.

My building is large so that a proper sized avatar has camera room - not so that a giant can be in wall proportionate for their over the top size.

A good case for getting avatar size down is how the mesh bends and animates - as you stretch it, that gets bent as well. Particularly with motion capture dances, you can tell when an avatar is too big or too small.

A smaller avatar arguably will texture better as well - fewer of the pixels will be getting stretched - and those that are won't be stretched as far.

Hur-hur-hur.

Sure you can. I know for sure a couple good prefabs will fit on a 512. AM Radio's Refuge House and Rustica's Lagnmoor Crooked House. You should be able to build something nice that'll fit, easy. Doing it and furnishing it with 117 prims is the trick.

OCD?

It's not a goal in SL for most people, which is why most people stay around the default height or taller. It does seem to be an obsession for a limited number of people to the point that I think of them as "correct" height evangelicals. (Praise the Lord! I have seen the light and made my avatar 5'7"!!!)

I personally could care less. My avatar is 6'6". There are certain prim accessories in my inventory that simply cannot be modified to fit if I go below a certain height unless I am going to make my avatar appear noticeably different by messing with the proportions, so I actually have practical disincentives to make my avatar shorter.

A wise choice, in my opinion. I use 6'6" avs to create couples animations and they work pretty well with any combination of avatar sizes between the late 5's and the early 7's - insofar as any animations can be accurate on that unholy mesh.

Yep. That works for my 5' dwarf alt (couldn't manage the 4' 10" max to meet the medical definition) and my yet-to-be-finished attic makes a bit more sense now he's got a corner to call his own. I edited the setting to 15 degrees because he's still a good bit bigger than a tiny.

Still the servers dump him on the floor below when I relog him. The space is just too tight. It's the same old story: comfortably 'realistic' spaces just aren't processed well.

Nevertheless that's a great device, Argent. I really like the view in general. My place is full of tight corners even by less-than-real standards and it makes for a real smooth camera tour. It also makes flying look a good deal better. I think I'll use the 'biggers' setting as a regular thing on all my avs.

Ideally I'd like to edit the script down to work automatically on_rez and dump it in my AO so I don't have to think about activating the camera. Do you think that would work?