The truth about Shapes

Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield for example and I believe young people would still consider them sexy, again its about proportion.

I dunno... if you ask young people they would prolly not even know who they are LOL

and I am thinking even heavier than marilyn. she was curvy but not overly large

Queen Latifa (if i spelled it right)

yeah her size, large women, not necessarily tall, but not skinny or small either

Sorry, it was the first pic on google for "body shape".

Me, I likes 'em meaty myself.

those pics that he links too are what I was talking about (sorry did not notice the links earlier LOL)

I couldn't have worded it better.

The question, which one of these is "right", isn't a valid question for this discussion. We are not talking about works of art, or of recreating anything, or of deciding that one real shape is better than another real shape. We are only discussing whether or not the average person is able to recognise a decent human shape, AND move sliders accordingly.

The argument was made that not everyone is able to recognise what is a decent human shape, and that only people who have an 'eye' for it can do so. Branching off into recreating something, etc. is changing the subject.

I say that, because of our life's experience of seeing millions of human shapes/proportions, we are ALL able to know that, when we've moved a slider, the result is in or out of reasonable proportion. It doesn't take any study, or a gifted eye, to see someone in the street and KNOW that the person is unusually tall, or unusually short. It doesn't take any study, or a gifted eye, to see someone in the street and KNOW that the person in view is long lgged or or short legged.

So getting back to the topic, anyone can make good shapes in SL, simply because we ALL know what a good human shape looks like, and achieving it is only a matter of sliding sliders. It's true that those who do a lot of it can do it more quickly, but everyone can do it.

There is another 'however' one of my friends in SL has these amazingly ridiculously long legs, to me a bit too long for a correct proportion, when I first saw her avatar I thought that is was just wrong, here's the however, I have seen her pictures on MySpace and in RL her legs are proportionally long too!

In all this long discussion, there is a point that has ben touched only slightly.

SL and the 3D digital world is an entirely different medium than print, photo, paintings or even real life or sculptures.

Some times scale goes right out the window for visually pleasing effects. If your house in SL has 3 meter ceilings it feels cramped. In RL, 3 meter ceilings are about the highest you get unless you have a loft or live in a cathedral. Details get lost when reduced to the screen size scale and therefore are overstated in order to be seen. This gives way to anything from very large breasts to extending the chin a little more to give the profile an attractive curve along the throat. Like any other form of art, once you know all the rules you know how to break them to achieve the best result.

Yes.

...but some people DO make better shapes then others and paying the people who do make better shapes then others is just as valid as paying someone to make low-prim furniture when anyone could put two prims together and add a nice fabric texture to them and call it a sofa. I mean, everyone knows what a sofa should look like, right?

Art is subjective, Phil. That means just because you don't see it as Art doesn't mean it's not Art.

I like a little meat on the bones. But I also like thin women. And tall, long legged woman, and small women, and round women, and square women, and red womwn, and white women and balck women and blue woman and long hair and short hair and red hair and brown hair and .......

/me sighs contentedly.

Yeah, I like her too

Agreed. This sort of thing was discussed earlier in the thread if you remember. It is wholly subjective. There is no right and wrong in shapes.

In whose eyes do they make better shapes? It's wholly subjective. It's not at all like making furniture. A piece of furniture comprises the the prims and the textures. Together they make the whole thing. A shape comprises the shape - no skin. Different skins will look good or bad on it.


I'll wind up my posts in this thread with this (I hope )...

If people believe that they themselves cannot recognise whether or not a shape is out of proportion is some respect, in spite of their whole life's experience of seeing human shapes, then those people cannot really make a shape in SL. It seems that a few people so far in this thread think of themselves like that. The rest of us are very capable of knowing whether or not a shape is reasonably well proportioned. Good for us!

"but everyone can do it"

I love statements like this. All it takes to be proven false is a single counter example. There have been plenty of counter examples and personal admissions given in this trhead alone. I don't think I need to add my own experiences with more than one person who came to me frustrated and angery because they could not get the shape they wanted. Phill will jsut say they did not spend enough time trying.

Why spend that much time and frustration when for 100 L$ you can buy a nice pre-made shape? How much is your time worth to you, anyway? I hope more than two bits an hour.

I already said it can take time - especially the face. And we already agreed that there's no need to spend the time doing it. It doesn't mean that people can't do it though. The discussion for long enough has been whether or not it takes a gifted eye to be able to do it. One or two have argued that without such an eye, people simply cannot make good shapes. That's the discussion. We know that it takes time, or the 'will' to do it.

So then it should be perfectly acceptable to pay someone to create a shape for you to save you from the time it takes to do it.

See ya Phil, I'm off to work, but that really is a nice red jacket you have on there. Did you make it yourself?

Of course. Nobody suggestion anything different.

What's with the red jacket? It's been mentioned twice, and gone right over my head.

Argh no, your paraphrase is _not_ accurate. What i'm saying is, the very existence of AVs that go around with vastly incorrect proportions suggests that people using these avatars don't see anything wrong in their appearance. It's not "opinion" but "conclusion" -- if there was no mishaped AVs, i'd have no reason to reach it. In turn your personal interpretation of this evidence is along lines of "these people know their AVs are mishaped but that's their deliberate choice". That's why i mentioned Ockham's razor, your interpretation requires existence of at least one extra element (awareness one is altering their shape beyond that of normal human being)


Yes, hence people take lessons to learn this very subject. But i forgot, "there's no point in discussing why people do it" because it's inconvenient argument, as it suggests your belief might be wrong

(and yes, i said i'm dropping the argument but that's not giving you carte blanche to misrepresent my stance in it, sorry)

I represented it as I understood it.

Well, maybe they intended what you think of as misshapes, or maybe your opinion of their misshapes is not necessarily correct. Do you claim to have a gifted eye yourself?

Maybe it does suggest that my belief may be wrong - but it isn't. I'll say it again - each person has a whole lifetime's experience of what humans look like, and is well able to see when a body part is way out of proportion to the rest of the body - just like we can in the street. That ability doesn't take a gifted eye, or study, or any other speciality. If you disagree, ok.

Perhaps Hans Christian Anderson and his story of "The Emperors New Clothes".

This thread has been an interesting read. I like the comments about how SL is NOT RL in the sense of proportion and function. To varying degrees we all make attemps to design around the familiar (to imitate life), but SL is more than that. For me it is a means to bring life to my art. My art just so happens to do with skins, shapes, and (to a lesser degree) clothing. All those things DO take on a life of thier own once someone buys them and incorporates them into the personality of their avatar and RL puppeteer by combining them with creations from others.

As with all human coded virtual worlds, there are a plethora of limitations, of which MANY apply to the human shaped avatars. I seek to overcome many shape limitations through detailed skin design. My workflow often involves designing a rough mashup of the skin texture, then tweaking the shape sliders to resemble the live model and so forth through many iterations. I never get a perfect match. The ears are too low. The nose has NO slider adjust for verticle length. I could go on and on with the anatomical issues I have with the avatar, but we should never forget it is merely a hybrid of Ruth, the androgenous SL ancestor to us all (male or female) with a surprisingly few number of polygons (3912).

What it all boils down to for me is that skin and shape are more like a single entity. The only reason I don't sell skins and shapes together is because it seems like forcing something upon someone unneccesarily (like Microsoft Windows bundled with IE, but that is another topic). I sell shapes separately as Mod, Copy, so they are meant as a starting point for further fine tuning. I do package the skin, shape, and hair together with custom work because I am designing a specific look that is intended to model as accurately as possible a RL counterpart. All other items sold to the general SL population can and should have a much looser interpretation.

Well, that's my take on it anyway. I find the number 1.618 absolutely fascinating in how many places it comes up in nature and on the human body (lips/nose, finger joints, face/navel/feet, etc.). What else is fascinating is how finely tuned we are to unconciously picking up on the ratio 1.618/1. There really is more to it than cut and dry math.

Still, math is fun for quantifying ones freedoms or limitations. If my math is correct, the number of slider combinations there are on the SL avatar (not including eyebrow sliders) is...

11,643,588,000,000,000,000,000,000

... and the number of pixel combinations between the three avatar textures is...

1.946530566481336886565775672414569804782264479367576988363305724968159433525555771610521554178171947187244552554716281309561895330925500971680227398064805036043649400889562785872554879998839195093089051642288332e+1509

I guess I feel pretty free, given those numbers.

Phil, "many,if not most"? Why are you representing something as you understand it instead of how the writer meant it?

I have no eye for human shapes, I just don't. You saying I do, doesn't make it so.
I have no talent for graphic design on a computer. It isn't gonna happen. But I can take a piece of wood and turn it into a carved jewelry box. I can take a pile of 2x4s and plywood and build a house. Could you? Do you have those talents and skills? Does everyone?

I'm not.

Are you saying that, from your lifetime of seeing humans, you are unable to know if an RL girl has long legs or short legs for her body? Or if a person's neck is unusually long or short. If you are saying that, I don't believe you. If you are saying that, after adjusting your av's neck, you are totally unable to see if it's too short, I don't believe you. Sorry.

We are not discussing artistic or creative abilities. I know that a couple of people have tried to take it that way, but they deviated from the discussion - perhaps because they can't argue against the real discussion, and they want to be against something We are ONLY talking about whether or not it needs a gifted eye (or even training) to tell whether or not someone's arms are longer than usual for their body.

Perhaps you only read the last few pages of the thread, and didn't understand what's being discussed.

You say you are representing the opinion as you understand it. Sounds like you play it both ways.

When it comes to transferring that vision to a medium, no I do not have that talent.

What is making a shape if not an artistic or creative endeavor? You seem to be the only one saying it isn't.

I have read the whole thread from the start, I understand it fully. It appears that you are the one trying to sidetrack the discussion because you can't back up your claims. But then many, if not most, posters to these boards know the kind of word games you play.

Nope, i don't; for that matter i could probably use myself as evidence that people do come with varied degree of proportion sense -- while i can spot large exaggerations, i can easily miss smaller ones that some other people in turn are able to spot and point out. And i did use reference pics to verify proportions of my own shape, something which shouldn't be necessary according to your belief, since having seen humans in person my entire life i should have no need for it, right?

tl;dr: As far as sense of proportions go i'd rank myself as average. Some people are better at this than me. This alone suggests there can be such thing as keen eye for shapes, something i don't have but have evidenced in others.