Making a Proper Shape - A Guide to Human Proportions

Well Shirley, I have to disagree. I choose my SL shape to be taller than RL because I want to look comfortable in SL furniture. I would say that most of the times I look ok in SL furniture. My female shapes are between 1,80 and 1,90 m, or a bit over 6 feet.
Of course some times the furniture is looking to big even for me. But that's not often.
First pic shows me sitting in a movie theater next to a dummy noob. I think the male noob dummy is made to be 6 feet? We look the same height.

Next one on a chair made by a very popular pose maker. They sell lots of their furniture with poses.

/me nods
You are the perfect pinup shape, Ann. Like this?


I think most of us in SL are making our shapes slightly unrealistic. I must say a big Thank You for the measurement kit. I am happy with my shape and I managed to avoid the short arms and way to long legs, but after trying the kit, I made my head a bit bigger, and I like the way it looks now. I't good to have a tool like that, and then we can choose to ignore it and make a superhero, a pinup or an elf like shape.

Yes, it looks like with a proper straight standing pose, Ann is damn close to 8 heads anyway.

I wouldn't say the head is too small either, not from that photo. The waist is a tad on the small size...but not too exaggerated and disppropionate.

I think if you make a shape in between 7.25 to 8 heads, and follow the OP guidelines, you're going to look proportionately sound imo

My pet peeves are excessively tiny waists on both male & females, pin heads on male shapes (don't find that often on female shapes at all) short arms and excessive size boobies. I find with the latter...at some point it begins to distort the skin texture and deliver jagged edges, therefore I'm happier to stick with B & C cups in general, I'll make the occasional D but no larger than that ever. I have tried to go larger for customer requests...didn't like the results so canned it!

What is an elf like shape?

I am an Elf in SL since i started and did not know we had a special shape.

Sources vary, some show them as tall spindley metrosexual creatures spending much time primping their hair. Others paint them as short happy creatures spending their time making shoes and cookies.

Nice post Briana, very informative, not applicable to Roo's and other furries but an interesting read

There's been a current of opinion running through this thread the suggests you can't follow good artistic proportion and stand out from the crowd.



8 heads tall, shoulders & hips the same size, arms reaching mid-thighs, breasts smaller than head and *curves*. The av is taller than I normally wear, but still in proportion and not noticeably tall in SL.

Does it make me look the same as everyone else?

<edit> No, I'm not suggesting everyone goes out and turns furry.

I wish the standard proportions were easily translated into furry... I think I got a good balance but it's hard to work out as easily with the prim heads, hands, and feet

The guide says to measure without prim hair. Her avatar is closer to 9 or more heads tall. Her improperly proportioned avatar still looks pretty good to me.

I honestly do not think furries have the same 'ideal' constraints on avatar proportions.

Furry dating was my 2005 phase and in my experience most furies generally look quite fine...Maybe because so many of the avatar creators are artist with knowledge of body proportions and what not? I do know that avatars from say 2004-2005 look a little more toonish than newer furry avatars and also have larger Disney'ish heads.

She isn't though...I tried Vaelissa's kit out of curiosity and it's more like 9-9.5 heads, even without the heels. Must be the pose making it look like 8ish.

Alot of these points have been touched on many times over the years. Skin and shape designers desiring to create accurately sized and proportioned avatars have run into problems using shorter dimensions, particularly on legs and arms..the claim is that you can't quite get the right tone and definition unless you size it up disproportionately to real world human dimensions.

Also, there is more at influence to the problem than just supposedly naive people making shapes and objects at seemingly arbitrarily oversized dimensions. There is something terribly wrong with scaling and dimensions in the VR itself. Don't believe me? Look at the room you're sitting in right now in Real Life. Estimate its size in length and width. The room I'm in now is roughly 12' by 15'. If I rez a cube, its equivelant would be close to 5m by 4m. If I use one of the male shapes in this kit, which supposedly has my avatar at a real world 5'10", and stand on this cube, compare it to me standing in roughly the same spot in the real room, the scale does not even come CLOSE to matching. It's more like me standing on a throw rug in the middle of my real room. Try it.

That scale problem alone is probably the single most influencial factor in people building "big" in Second Life. The scale MIGHT be technically accurate, but it just doesn't "feel" right in the scene. It feels tiny. Someone with a better understanding of 3D modelling can probably explain the reasons for this, but it is demonstrable even to the untrained eye.

3.6m by 4.5m, and it's got furniture in it, which makes a HUGE difference to the perceived size of the room. And you're inside it, not on the outside surrounded by nothing. Make a scale model of your room, furniture and all, and make your avatar the correct size *as measured against a prim*, and stick a poseball in sitting at your desk, it will look right.

If the scale doesn't come close to matching, then there's something wrong with your calculations, or there's something wrong with the size estimate given by the kit. Because when I make stuff real size it can be hard to cam around in but it doesn't look wrong.

Actually I'm going to do this tonight when I get home. Measure everything, get it as precise as I can, furniture, entertainment center, everything. You may be right, it may be that I'm just not considering the entire perspective. I'm not the only one who has expressed this observation though.

I do not agree at all. In 2004 I made a few prefabs to scale and they were fine for normal proportioned human avatars, not fine for 7-8' avatars.

Most of the yacht makers in SL also build to scale. I have a replica of the 11th largest Super Yacht in the world, The Pelorus. It is built to scale, and i look fine in it, as do some larger avatars actually, they just look odd in the smaller areas like walk spaces.

I have built the room my computer sits in, in RL, inside SL, it is 20'x20', and with all my furniture built to scale that is in the room as well, it looks perfect in SL for my avatar. But once a 7'+ footer walks into the room things immediately look toyish.

There is nothing wrong with the 3D scaling in SL.

The problem is that people build for their camera comfort, which in turn makes larger rooms, which people in turn make larger furnishings to fill the room, and then end up making larger avatars to not look too small in the room and on the furniture.

Our entire new line of furniture will be split into Larger and Normal versions - and hopefully when people see the difference in the size (which looks pretty dramatic), they will scale down. I will also be placing the Proportion kit in the store...Maybe as an auto giver for people over 6'10".....Crystalshard Foo, i have a job for yoo...

loose lips sink ships!

Isn't that the root of the problem though? Camera performance is 50% of everything in SL as far as I'm concerned. I even avoid common builder's tricks like using a hollow a box for a room because the camera goes crazy when it is focused on an interior wall.

I think we would go a long way toward solving these building proportion and avatar height issues if the camera control permissions you mentioned over on the other thread () were improved sooner rather than later.

That's still not clear.

I only expect height to change the vertical dimension, so torso thickness and body fat don't seem relevant at all. But if that's what it's trying to say, then it should just say that height only adjusts vertical dimensions, without adjusting horizontal ones proportionately. The way it's worded suggests that something else is going on.

Head size is relevant, but the wording I quoted doesn't suggest that the problem is that one of the dimensions is missing from the list. It says it changes things in smaller increments, with no indication of which of those, if any, are changed disproportionately.

So my question remains. If changing the height slider isn't the same as changing the individual vertical dimensions the same, then which ones are different? If I increase the height by 10%, say going from 50 to 55, how does that differ from increasing torso, leg, neck, and arm lengths, along with head size, by 10% each?

I got the proportion kit and it was fun playing with it! My avatar was not too far off from reasonable although I noticed she had snuck up to 6-6". It's prolly because I've been hanging out with a really tall guy (oh hell, he's grossly tall and knows it) and forgot that I hit my sliders to fit his scale a little better.

So as an exercise, I composited up this photo showing my ava after I finished tweaking her. According to the scale, I'm 6'3" and 8 1/4 boxes tall. The angle of the photo make it look like the control box is larger than my head but it's not. Oh and the side shot was to show how the skin makes the boobs look much bigger than they would otherwise. My sliders are set at 50. Most skins & shapes are sold with them set to 60.

Comments, suggestions are welcome. The skin shown is my modded Pleiades.



You can zoom in on the original Picassa image here:

Avatar Proportions Example

May I suggest that you just put together a list of proportions for men and women (and perhaps kids)? Something succinct, such as the head should be between 1/7 and 1/8 of the total height, the bottom of the knees three quarters of the way down, the waist 3/8 of the way down, and so on. The picture Briana posted as #4 contains this info, but it's not clear if it's for women only, and it's hard to convert "head line" into a proportion, without the diagram (for those of us who think in words and numbers).

I nearly gave up on this thread, because the first two posts in the thread just seemed to be about why proportions are important (something I thought obvious). I was just looking for what the proportions should be. How to measure and adjust them in SL is a different discussion - worthwhile (in other words, it's real good stuff that you have there), but separate. It was only halfway through the third post that actual proportions were discussed - way too late for my attention span. It's only the quantity of subsequent discussion that brought me back.

In RL we are not all properly porportined. Now, if we all went around looking properly porportioned and fit the norm, where iis the individuality?

I really dont care if you're 7ft or 3 ft... I dont automaticly look at a shorter avatar and think they are a kid.. Most of the kid avatars, if you bother to look in their profile state that.... I never assume anything about anyone. And if you are offended by this maybe you should get a tougher skin.. har har..

Don't make everyone fit into an ideal mold..

I for one in rl and 5'6 I and use 90 and 100ht in sl because I think this looks right... and I dont really have any issues getting items to fit or animations to work.
Actually what I do find is a need to adjust it smaller...(the poseballs)

Now I will say I see shorter avatars in couples dance balls and it looks like the male is lifting them off the ground.

I understand about animations.. maybe you animation guys should make it easer to adjust for different avatars and celebrate the individuality instead of complaing about how different the avatars are in SL..

I appreciate the knowledge offered here and the time it took to gather, but I honestly dont care how many heads I am.. I like the way I look and thats all I care about.

Sorry, i didn't read the part for hair....yes looking at those little boxes,they include your hair too....so i guess you're right it's probably 9. Still looks ok to me

its like i said in an earlier post.....there's a range of x value heads, where everything still looks relatively proportionate .....and thank god for that too.

Again, I did say it may be (and probably is) technically accurate, but that doesn't make it "feel" right. You're probably right that it is mostly just the camera issue, and I am quite possibly allowing other things to influence my perception of the scale. It still has never "felt" right to me for some reason. There has to be a reason though why the temptation is so strong and the tendency so prevalent to scale up. It is all arbitrary after all, including the SL "meter" itself. For me, this is more than just the camera behavior.

The "properly proportioned" female avatar shape in the kit looks like Gollum with the hands of Lebron James.