Building to Scale (Why you should, and some tips!)
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Penny Patton
Registered User
Join date: 8 Dec 2005
Posts: 82
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08-02-2009 06:18
Scale in SL is really screwed up, there's absolutely nothing in the avatar editing window to actually tell you how tall your avatar is, and most scripted avatar rulers don't actually measure your avatar at all (which causes a lot of confusion, and no end of frustration for both content creators and some roleplayers).* For that, there's several Jira issues each requesting some way of telling us our avatar's actual height. Here's a couple: https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-7253https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-1094https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-345 There's also a whole mess of complaints about proportions, and requests for the ability to make larger avatars. Believe it or not, most of these stem from people not realizing how tall their avatar actually is. Which brings up the first reason you should make your avatar to scale: The base female av mesh is 6'4"/193cm, and the arm length sliders on avatars are skewed towards shorter arms. So the taller you are, the less able you are to create arms long enough to match. Since most people have an aversion to using slider extremes for anything except legs, butts, and boobs, we have a large population of people with freaky-short arms. Since limb length is independent of avatar height, and the sliders are skewed towards short arms, it's possible to keep limb proportions looking good to a height of about 5'/152cm or shorter. Much taller than 7'/213cm, or maybe 7'6"/229cm, and it starts to become more and more difficult to get arms looking long enough. Most male avatars are around 7'6" or taller. It's not unusual to see avatars over 8'/244cm tall. Tiny arms and all. The next reason people should build to scale is probably one that will resonate with residents the most. When you build super huge, as most people in SL do, it means you need to use more land area, and more prims. Sims are small enough as it is. Do we really need to make it harder on ourselves by requiring all buildings to be nearly twice as large as they ought to be? When we build to scale, we get far more out of our land, and we free up more prims to use on other things. In effect, getting almost twice as much value out of our land. Almost like making sims twice as large. Another reason is that it would allow us to make both extremely short and extremely tall avatars. Currently, with both the paranoia over so-called ageplay in SL and a broader psychological need to fit in with other avatars, most people avoid the shorter end of the avatar height spectrum like it was riddled with plague-juice. Meanwhile, since most avatars push the taller end, it's impossible to make an extremely tall avatar. Even prim based monster and robot avatars wind up only about a head taller than many non-prim avatars. If the average avatar were 5'10"/178cm (average human height in the United States), then we'd see a wider range of avatar height from those who really want to go for the extremes. An 8'9" avatar would really tower over the crowds, and we'd see more people willing to adopt 5'-5'9" av heights, realistic adult human heights that you'll rarely see used in SL today. Another reason to build to scale would be incredibly beneficial for everyone. It's easier to scale up avatar attachments than it is to scale down. If the average avatar were 5'5"-5'10" there would be a whole lot less need to scale attachments down. Most content creators, on the other hand, should probably build to the smallest shapes they can manage, and then scale their creations up to the average. That would put an end to a very frustrating problem that has probably struck all of us at one time or another. Another reason why it's better to build to scale, it looks so much better. When you see obvious scale issues in a professional production, like a movie or a videogame, it stands out, since most of the time some effort is put forward to keep everything a consistent scale. When you walk into a club in SL and the bar stools are up to your shoulder, the windows are all larger than an entire wall in your house or apartment, the chairs are all designed to make the average avatar feel like a kid in the big people's chair, and the ceilings are 10 metres high, it looks bad. When everyone is at least aware of scale, and able to build around it, things look so much better. And the final reason (for this post) on why you should build to scale, future-proofing yourself and your content. Linden Lab keeps promoting SL as useful for architectures, educators, recreations of real world places, and many things like that. Now, someday LL is going to realize that they need to encourage more universal scale within SL if it is ever going to actually be useful for a lot of those things (Right now, it's really not. See how many people visit your accurate and detailed recreation of the White House when only a small handful can even fit through the front door). When that day comes, new residents will start appearing with much smaller avatars, and they'll be looking for content that works for them, right out of the box, and many sim owners will find that they can do a lot more with their builds when they work to scale. Meanwhile, building to scale now won't hurt you since it's so simple to scale up after building small. *Everything in SL is measured by what some people call "prim height". Prims, of course, land, and avatars. Most people who do use scripted avatar rulers or "height detectors" use a scripting feature known as llAgentHeight. Agent Height does not actually measure your avatar, it measures an invisible box connected to your avatar that SL uses for collision detection. This box is shorter than your avatar, so for a 5'8" avatar, it will turn out a number like 5'2". It should be noted that the script is measuring this collision box in prim metres. It is not, as some believe, a separate scale of measurement. This is why so many measuring scripts give you a number that doesn't match what you find when you use an actual prim to measure yourself. There are some measuring scripts that are accurate, but these are far less common.
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Gaia Clary
mesh weaver
Join date: 30 May 2007
Posts: 884
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08-02-2009 07:30
I have read your post with interest. When i entered SL about 2 years ago, i also found out very quickly that something must be wrong with the scales... I have been asking people constantly since then, why they did scale themself and their environment in such a way and i got many answers like: - "If you make things too small, you can't see the details any more" - "It is an effect about human perception" - "I bought them like this and can't scale them down" - ... The only reasonable answer i ever got was the issue with closed rooms and the avatar camera: As the typical position of the camera seems to be somewhat like 3 meters above ground and ~2 meters behind the avatar, all buildings which try to build to scale will suffer from camera problems. Hence buildings are created in double size in order to keep the rooms visitable without ending up with the camera in the secnd floor while the avatar is still on ground floor... Now my solution to that problem was always not to build closed rooms, or if i wanted to do that, i was always creating halls, domes, etc. which are huge anyways and so i could keep scaling correct without effort. Well, i think the truth is somewhere in the middle. I can't say that building to scale is always what we should do here, but i definitively would appreciate if objects "could" be scaled to a reasonable size if i wanted them to be smaller or bigger (like the coconuts and the sun-loungers) ahhh, that reminds me on these beautifull but much too tall trees i bought recently. Since i couldn't scale them down, i ended up making my own (not soo beautifull but correct in scale at least  ) cheers, Gaia
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Penny Patton
Registered User
Join date: 8 Dec 2005
Posts: 82
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08-02-2009 07:53
The camera is a problem. You can easily accommodate all avatar sizes and the SL camera by placing ceilings at 3.5m high. This is a low ceiling for most of SL, but it works just fine if you try it, and you can usually get away by furnishing a room like that to scale without it looking too odd.
Really Linden Lab needs to move the camera placement, they should maybe look at what videogames do with camera placement these days. In the meantime, it is really easy to move the camera yourself using a scripted attachment. There's a bunch of these floating around. I include them with my steampunk avatars. I've seen them sold around SL, usually for incredibly cheap. The camera problem is easier to solve than the avatar height problem.
As for the comments about perception and not seeing the details, well, I always wear an attachment that moves my camera to a better position. I can tell you that this makes immersion a lot stronger, and really puts you in the world, unlike the default camera postion.
Now, "building small makes the details too small to see"? That's just rubbish. If anything, it lets you conserve prims more easily to add more detail, and none of it is hard to see unless you always keep the camera zoomed out to the maximum distance.
You're definitely right about creating buildings designed with tall ceilings in mind, too. I tend to see people upscaling those as well, though, which doesn't make any sense. A month or two ago, a friend of mine bought a prefab barn for their first time buying land. The barn was scaled to about twice the size it should have been and took up more than half the guy's land. With some work, we were able to shrink it to half the size, and in doing so we were able to save 105 prims, nothing to sneeze at! He set up his land, and it regularly has the usual 7-8' tall avatars wandering around no problem.
It took a lot of work, though, since the creator included lots of prims with the minimum size on at least one dimension. So we had to track each of those down, manually, and either rip them out or resize them. If the barn had been built to scale in the first place, most people would have twice as much room to work with right off the bat, and anyone who wanted the barn larger could just scale it up easily.
Recently on the blog Pathfinder Linden was showing off a Frank Lloyd Wright museum. You can bet that these recreations were way out of scale, and by necessity lacking in detail they might otherwise be able to work in if done to proper scale. Recreations of real buildings are much more immersive and authentic when done to scale. It really gives you much more of a sense of "being there". Feeling like either a giant or a child, because nothing is to proper scale, really hurts the effect. And the additional prims used to create larger recreations takes away from prims that could be used with the small details that really make a quality build stand out.
Linden Lab should really make this information known to all residents. There's no reason to hide avatar height from people, especially when you want to create a huge, consistent virtual world where thousands of individuals are all creating works in the same space.
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Rolig Loon
Not as dumb as I look
Join date: 22 Mar 2007
Posts: 2,482
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08-02-2009 08:21
From: Gaia Clary The only reasonable answer i ever got was the issue with closed rooms and the avatar camera: As the typical position of the camera seems to be somewhat like 3 meters above ground and ~2 meters behind the avatar, all buildings which try to build to scale will suffer from camera problems. Hence buildings are created in double size in order to keep the rooms visitable without ending up with the camera in the secnd floor while the avatar is still on ground floor... Now my solution to that problem was always not to build closed rooms, or if i wanted to do that, i was always creating halls, domes, etc. which are huge anyways and so i could keep scaling correct without effort. Well, i think the truth is somewhere in the middle. I can't say that building to scale is always what we should do here, but i definitively would appreciate if objects "could" be scaled to a reasonable size if i wanted them to be smaller or bigger (like the coconuts and the sun-loungers) ahhh, that reminds me on these beautifull but much too tall trees i bought recently. Since i couldn't scale them down, i ended up making my own (not soo beautifull but correct in scale at least  ) Yeah, the camera issue is the one that drives scale for most builders. I have tried building with "normal" ceiling heights. It's frustrating. You try to move around and your camera pops in and out of the ceiling. You feel claustrophobic and you move like a newbie. Really, though....... why worry about it? Size is purely arbitrary. There's no relationship between a meter in RL and one in a virtual world, so it doesn't matter whether some detector says you are 5'10" tall or 6'5". I agree that there are some really ugly, misproportioned avatars in SL. People don't use the Appearance slider well, or have no artistic sense. At the same time, of course, there are a lot of ugly, misshapen people in RL too. If you want to be truly unkind and insensitive, you can observe that people who are far from "normal" size in RL -- too tall, too short, too fat, too thin -- are the ones that get labelled as "ugly" by society. Why should we perpetuate that way of thinking in SL? Especially here, where there are no health implications to being "odd-sized," just let people look the way they do. Get on with life. As for buildings, .... If you want to make tiny avs and build tiny buildings, do it.... or huge ones, for that matter. This is a virtual world. We don't have to be bound by RL construction rules, building codes, our our imaginations. One of the greatest things about SL is that it is NOT a video game constructed by graphic designers for people to come and play in. It's created by us. That means a lot of the construction is done by rank amateurs who have limited skill and questionable design sense. Like their avatars, the buildings they make are "ugly." Their massive buildings take up WAY too much space and eat prims like crazy. Their clashing alpha textures make us dizzy. If that's the price we pay for self-determination, though, I'm all for it. If nothing else, the "ugly" buildings make me appreciate the best ones even more.
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It's hard to tell gender from names around here but if you care, Rolig = she. And I exist only in SL, so don't ask....  Look for my work in XStreetSL at 
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Penny Patton
Registered User
Join date: 8 Dec 2005
Posts: 82
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08-02-2009 09:00
From: Rolig Loon Really, though....... why worry about it? Size is purely arbitrary. There's no relationship between a meter in RL and one in a virtual world, so it doesn't matter whether some detector says you are 5'10" tall or 6'5". See the first post for a pretty detailed list of reasons. Really, it's a visual design issue. An important one. When you have thousands of people all working in the same virtual environment, and none of them are given the tools to know how tall they are, scale quickly becomes a mess. This makes it more difficult to create a really exceptional looking environment, and outright cripples (and I do mean cripple, as in make it impossible) to use the platform for real world architectural purposes. The point that really should resonate with common SL resident consider scale is the issue of sim and land parcel sizes. If you build to suit 8'5" tall avatars, you're cutting your land area nearly in half. Most people build even larger than that, since they feel the need to give excessive amounts of space to the camera (3.5m really is the most you need to allow for it, but it's not unusual for people to go 5-10m high). Sure, measurement is arbitrary, it is in the real world, too. Using that as an argument against caring about scale doesn't take into consideration that even in the virtual world, you, and all content creators, only have so much space to work with. And that land is measured in square metres. If nothing else, that should stand out as good enough reason. But even so, there's a whole list of reasons (again, see the first post) on why people should worry about it.
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Penny Patton
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Join date: 8 Dec 2005
Posts: 82
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08-02-2009 09:06
And it's not the price we pay for self-determination, either. It's simply a lack of knowledge that is rooted in the fact that LL never thought to include some pretty basic information designers would need to know.
Having a growing population of people with no knowledge of their height makes things more difficult for all residents. A lot of people have purchased animations for their avatar that had them sinking into the ground, or floating above it. Almost everyone has purchased an attachment, maybe some hair or a pair of shows, and found that they couldn't resize it to properly fit.
This thread is all about explaining why that happens, and what can be done to avoid it in your own products.
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Rolig Loon
Not as dumb as I look
Join date: 22 Mar 2007
Posts: 2,482
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08-02-2009 10:17
From: Penny Patton This thread is all about explaining why that happens, and what can be done to avoid it in your own products. I have no problem with that. I just think there are more useful things to focus our energies on. The issue is not really how the tiny number of concerned builders who come to this forum deal with scale. It's how the average person in SL does it. The average person, frankly, couldn't care less. Yes, it shows in the things they build, many of which are dead ugly. I truly doubt, however, that anyone is going to do much about their design sense, and complaining here is just preaching to the choir, most of whom already have good ways to handle scale.
_____________________
It's hard to tell gender from names around here but if you care, Rolig = she. And I exist only in SL, so don't ask....  Look for my work in XStreetSL at 
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Briana Dawson
Attach to Mouth
Join date: 23 Sep 2003
Posts: 5,855
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08-02-2009 10:44
This thread is full of win!
Go Go Penny Patton!
Good post!
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Penny Patton
Registered User
Join date: 8 Dec 2005
Posts: 82
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08-02-2009 11:01
Er, but the average person isn't going to visit the "Building Tips" forum. I don't believe you're correct in stating most people who visit this forum do have a good handle on it. I've met some very experienced, and very talented builders, who have been completely confused by this issue.
That's why I made the thread, to clear up confusion. I ran into someone today who was convinced they were right around 6' tall. They'd been in SL for well over a year. They were closer to 7' tall. They had no idea. I have a friend who's a very talented content creator, who's been in SL longer than I have. They had been using a faulty av ruler all this time and were nearly a foot taller than they wanted to be.
You're right, though, this information would do a lot more good if LL provided av height info to everyone. Most people don't care about visual design, but if you throw someone into an environment like SL and you let them know their own height, chances are they're going to aim at a specific height. Probably tall, but not incredibly tall. Some will even aim for their own real height if they have that info right there. That's why so many people use height detectors, to get that information. Too bad most height detectors give bad info and make the problem worse.
Second, I wanted to keep this issue in the public eye. It's in everyone's best interest that LL provide height info to all residents. It's especially important when a new resident is first editing their avatar. Someone is more likely to aim for their preferred height then, rather than a year later when they've got over a thousand items in their inventory, mostly clothes and attachments for their 7 foot tall avatar which would need some serious editing time to resize. Especially when LL is touting SL as a platform for recreations of FLW architecture and for creating virtual versions of buildings yet to be made. And while it might do very little to improve the lowest common denominator in SL builds, simple changes like providing this info, and changing the camera placement, and providing av proportion guides/animations, and a host of other very small, very simple changes to SL will make it possible for everyone to create a better SL experience.
And really, this forum specifically is for people who want to build better. This is certainly an aspect of that. For people who want to build better there really is no "more useful things to focus our energies on" than anything that helps us improve.
Sure, people who don't care can ignore information like this, or any other tips and information provided. But posting "why even care about this?" is like walking into an art class and saying that every time the teacher or member of the class shares some tip or technique with everyone else. Just because most people only get as far as stick figures doesn't mean information like this shouldn't be out there for people who want to create something better.
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Briana Dawson
Attach to Mouth
Join date: 23 Sep 2003
Posts: 5,855
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08-02-2009 11:04
From: Penny Patton Sure, people who don't care can ignore information like this, or any other tips and information provided. But posting "why even care about this?" is like walking into an art class and saying that every time the teacher or member of the class shares some tip or technique with everyone else. Just because most people only get as far as stick figures doesn't mean information like this shouldn't be out there for people who want to create something better.
THIS.
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Penny Patton
Registered User
Join date: 8 Dec 2005
Posts: 82
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08-02-2009 11:18
And just in case I didn't make it clear enough, that there is so much confusion about av height and scale in SL actually does make it much more difficult for even those who do know, because we have to make so many concessions in our designs for those who do not. As nice as the work at the FLW museum Pathfinder was promoting might be, it still shows that very clearly, and it does detract from the intended experience, which is providing a virtual way to experience these real world works.
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Penny Patton
Registered User
Join date: 8 Dec 2005
Posts: 82
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08-02-2009 11:19
This forum needs "Thanks" buttons. Hee!
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Becka Andrew
Registered User
Join date: 19 May 2008
Posts: 95
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08-02-2009 11:25
Creating something has nothing to do with scale. You can model a car at 1:1, 4:1, 10:1 or whatever scale you want. The details are not scale specific, your ability to build is. If I build a house in SL to 1:1 scale of an RL house the quality would not be any different if it was 4:1 or 10:1. Everything would be the same, just the size would be different...
So I don't get your argument that scale effects quality and has an effect on "doing something better".
Most of the stuff in SL is imaginary anyway. There will never be a real build of it in RL so scale is irrelevant. If you are a engineer using SL for RL then you already know about scale and will use it.
SL is based on the camera and small areas do not work well with it so people build bigger. Simple as that. If LL was to change it all of the sudden then everything already built in SL would be screwed up.
Also if you go into Preferences and click the Input and Camera tab you can adjust your camera angles.
Also your argument about primes and land size seems flawed. If you build smaller, sure you have more room but your building will still use just as many primes, they will just be smaller...
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Argent Stonecutter
Emergency Mustelid
Join date: 20 Sep 2005
Posts: 20,263
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08-02-2009 11:43
From: Rolig Loon Really, though....... why worry about it?
Because huge avatars and huge buildings waste space. They're *more expensive* to maintain, because you need more land to build a building that they're comfortable in. In addition, this isn't a matter of a few creepy frankensteins, this is a matter of them being so common that people building to scale are being shunned and occasionally banned. From: someone As for buildings, .... If you want to make tiny avs and build tiny buildings, do it We're not talking about tinies here. And nobody's arguing that frankenbarbies shouldn't be allowed. Read the thread starter again... you ought to, because the responses to your arguments are already in there.
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Argent Stonecutter
Emergency Mustelid
Join date: 20 Sep 2005
Posts: 20,263
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08-02-2009 11:44
From: Rolig Loon I have no problem with that. I just think there are more useful things to focus our energies on. So you don't think people should encourage moderation in areas they're concerned about?
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SegmentationFault String
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Join date: 18 Jan 2009
Posts: 13
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08-02-2009 11:45
From: Becka Andrew Also if you go into Preferences and click the Input and Camera tab you can adjust your camera angles. That doesn't always help. Sometimes if I'm designing some attachment for clothing, I need a wide view of the whole avatar to see how the effect looks from other players' perspective, and I need to zoom in for detail work. If the room is built to scale, it's just as others have mentioned - the camera goes past the roof (or nearby walls), making it impossible to view the scene from your desired perspective. When I'm trying on clothing, sometimes I'll make use of free dressing rooms... and they have that exact problem. They're built as you might expect a RL dressing room, with walls no more than 3 or 4 meters apart and a ceiling just a meter or so over your head. As a result you can forget about pulling the camera back to see the whole avatar in the center of your screen, because the walls and ceiling get in the way.
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Becka Andrew
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Join date: 19 May 2008
Posts: 95
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08-02-2009 12:12
From: SegmentationFault String That doesn't always help. Sometimes if I'm designing some attachment for clothing, I need a wide view of the whole avatar to see how the effect looks from other players' perspective, and I need to zoom in for detail work. If the room is built to scale, it's just as others have mentioned - the camera goes past the roof (or nearby walls), making it impossible to view the scene from your desired perspective.
When I'm trying on clothing, sometimes I'll make use of free dressing rooms... and they have that exact problem. They're built as you might expect a RL dressing room, with walls no more than 3 or 4 meters apart and a ceiling just a meter or so over your head. As a result you can forget about pulling the camera back to see the whole avatar in the center of your screen, because the walls and ceiling get in the way. I agree. I was just pointing out if you want to build to scale then you can play with those settings to try and find a more optimal position. If your build is based on non-default settings you can leave a notecard out with instructions for people who visit. If you can't find a good cam position then there probably isn't much LL will be able to do about it anyway unless they want to push first person/mouselook.
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Rolig Loon
Not as dumb as I look
Join date: 22 Mar 2007
Posts: 2,482
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08-02-2009 12:57
From: Argent Stonecutter So you don't think people should encourage moderation in areas they're concerned about? Good point, Argent. I sorta put my foot into this one. As you may have noticed, I can occasionally get exercised about the fact that the average person in SL doesn't know (or care) about how to adjust prim clothing properly. I make a lot of atractive dresses and skirts, and it pains me to see them worn by women who seem to think it's OK to to wear something "off the rack." My great work looks like crap when it sits wrong on the hips or hasn't been resized to fit the buyer's waist and rump. Other than educational efforts in my own shop, however, I'm not going to proselytize across SL to make women more aware of how to dress right. If the subject comes up here -- as it has a few times -- I'll offer advice about how I deal with it. For the most part, though, I figure that the average person doesn't need my unsolicited advice, and the average designer in these forums already knows at least as much as I do about fitting clothes. It's one of those base-level skills that designers learn at the outset. That's where I was coming from as I stepped into this thread. Scale is important. I never said it wasn't. What I said, and meant, was that (1) most building in SL is done by "average" people, not graphic designers, and (2) people who frequent these forums generally know about scale already -- it's a base-level bit of knowledge. We can be as passionate as we like about scale -- just as I can about fitting skirts -- but we're just talking to ourselves and we're unlikely to make a dent in the way most buildings in SL look. If we actually tried to take the message to the masses, we'd probably just annoy the heck out of them. That's the basis of my "Why even worry about it?" comment. Incidentally, I may have accidentally tripped over a second element of this thread that is just as important as scale --- or maybe is an underlying motive for the thread itself. Many buildings in SL are designed to replicate RL. I truly admire people like you and Ceera who do it well. It is vital to have a good sense of scale for work like theirs to be convincing, and it's painfully obvious when an amateur builder doesn't. Again, though, the "average" builder in SL seems less concerned with replicating RL than with creating utilitarian space that satisfies their own artistic sense. I appreciate the freedom they have to create buildings without regard for what a building is "supposed" to look like. If Penny is right that "LL is touting SL as a platform for recreations of FLW architecture," I hope they don't limit that freedom along the way.
_____________________
It's hard to tell gender from names around here but if you care, Rolig = she. And I exist only in SL, so don't ask....  Look for my work in XStreetSL at 
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Becka Andrew
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Join date: 19 May 2008
Posts: 95
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08-02-2009 13:27
From: Rolig Loon If Penny is right that "LL is touting SL as a platform for recreations of FLW architecture," I hope they don't limit that freedom along the way. LL touts SL as a platform for many things. None of which make much difference for the average SL'er just wanting some social interaction and fun. For the people that want to recreate reality (I am not one of them) then more power to them for redoing something already done. I like things in SL that are original and not likely reproduced. Recreating reality has its uses such as virtual exploration and virtual tours of RL places, however I find modern day graphics can in no way represent the real thing (especially SL graphics). Maybe when Holo Decks are created... untill then it is just pixles. I think this is why LL is selling a license to the platform for people that want to recreat reality and other things. They can buy it and do as they wish. SL is just an example for them to use to "tout" what they can do if they buy the platform. I do not think at all LL is suggesting that SL users should use it like that. "Your world your Imagination" doesn't revolve around that concept.
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Penny Patton
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Join date: 8 Dec 2005
Posts: 82
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08-02-2009 17:51
From: Becka Andrew Creating something has nothing to do with scale. You can model a car at 1:1, 4:1, 10:1 or whatever scale you want. The details are not scale specific, your ability to build is. If I build a house in SL to 1:1 scale of an RL house the quality would not be any different if it was 4:1 or 10:1. Everything would be the same, just the size would be different... Try getting a job in videogames and saying that when your boss asks why the cars you set up for the latest GTA clone take up the entire road, and the characters only come up to the bumpers. Then when he tells you to clean out your desk, try explaining that the game is just imaginary anyway. From: someone SL is based on the camera and small areas do not work well with it so people build bigger. Simple as that. If LL was to change it all of the sudden then everything already built in SL would be screwed up. If LL were to change what? The camera placement? That wouldn't screw up anything. I changed my own camera position maybe a year ago now and have never gone back. From: someone Also if you go into Preferences and click the Input and Camera tab you can adjust your camera angles. There are easy ways to change camera placement, but how many people dig enough to mess with them? You can provide attachments and notecards, but how many people are going to use them? Changing the defaults would be more ideal. Then you could include a "classic camera" position setting for those who really want it. From: someone Also your argument about primes and land size seems flawed. If you build smaller, sure you have more room but your building will still use just as many primes, they will just be smaller... Er...seriously? Unless you use megaprims, you can only ever make a prim 10x10x10m. And there are limits to working with megaprims, since you can only use sizes that already exist. If you do use megaprims, it cannot be resized later. So, assume you're making a prefab house or club and don't want to use megaprims. You lay down the floor. How many prims are you going to use to make a 10x10m floor? 20x20? 30x30? If you're using the same number of prims to build the 10x10m building as you are with the 30x30m building, you're doing something horribly wrong. From: Rolig Loon If Penny is right that "LL is touting SL as a platform for recreations of FLW architecture," I hope they don't limit that freedom along the way. The best way for LL to approach this is to simply provide avatar height information. Some third party SL viewers ( like Meerkat http://meerkatviewer.org/ ) already provide this information to users. It does not limit freedom at all. If this information were provided, and it would have done the most good if LL had provided it from the beginning and also provided scale avatars for new users to choose from, then it would open up more creative freedom in SL as explained in this thread. (Frees up more space and prims to work with, allows for more av height variety, etc.)
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Paul Wardark
Wait, what?
Join date: 10 Jan 2009
Posts: 383
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08-02-2009 18:12
The argument is moot unless LL impliments some standards. Becka is right about one thing. Building to scale is worthless if everyone's using a different scale.
If LL implimented a standard to measure avatar height, all builders/designers could build everything to a standard scale.
Unfortunately, if LL did suddenly do that, most all builds, clothing attachments, and avatars would all have to be changed. It would be costly- both in L$ and time.
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Argent Stonecutter
Emergency Mustelid
Join date: 20 Sep 2005
Posts: 20,263
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08-02-2009 18:30
From: Paul Wardark The argument is moot unless LL impliments some standards. Becka is right about one thing. Building to scale is worthless if everyone's using a different scale. Everyone's using their own scale. They're all different. You might as well pick one that's got a running chance of matching someone else's. And that's 1:1. From: someone Unfortunately, if LL did suddenly do that, most all builds, clothing attachments, and avatars would all have to be changed. It would be costly- both in L$ and time. They wouldn't *have* to change any more than we have to build to 2:1.
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Penny Patton
Registered User
Join date: 8 Dec 2005
Posts: 82
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08-02-2009 18:34
From: Paul Wardark The argument is moot unless LL impliments some standards. Becka is right about one thing. Building to scale is worthless if everyone's using a different scale.
If LL implimented a standard to measure avatar height, all builders/designers could build everything to a standard scale. It's not quite worthless, but you're both definitely right that it would have the biggest impact if SL made it a standard by providing height info, and scaled avatars. (And fixed the camera position.) From: someone Unfortunately, if LL did suddenly do that, most all builds, clothing attachments, and avatars would all have to be changed. It would be costly- both in L$ and time. This I don't agree with. LL suddenly releasing a viewer that shows av height information will not have an overnight effect. In fact, many people try to use that fact as an argument against even doing it (the "why bother?" crowd). Even if they did provide properly scaled avatars and fixed the camera, it would take a long time before it really had much of an effect. The change to inworld content would occur over a lengthy period of time, most often as content creators rolled out new content at the pace they would be doing so anyways. It's true, though, that content creators who planned for it would have an advantage. But that's what planning ahead is all about.
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Briana Dawson
Attach to Mouth
Join date: 23 Sep 2003
Posts: 5,855
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08-02-2009 19:39
From: Paul Wardark
Unfortunately, if LL did suddenly do that, most all builds, clothing attachments, and avatars would all have to be changed. It would be costly- both in L$ and time.
What? No.
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Ceera Murakami
Texture Artist / Builder
Join date: 9 Sep 2005
Posts: 7,750
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08-02-2009 20:33
As a pro builder, I have struggled with the scale issue a lot. I settled on a scale of 1.25 to 1 or 1.5 to 1 for "Realistic" building in SL, for many reasons. First, here is what happens if you build at exact scale, 1:1 : * Many people can't use your building, because they can't get through the doors, or they bump their heads on the ceiling in stairwells. Many people will not use or buy the furniture or vehicles that you offer, because they are "too small" and their avatar looks like an adult visiting a kindergarten classroom and trying to sit at a child's desk. Many people whose avatars are of "Typical" (and admittedly over-large"  scale in SL will choose not to visit your sims or buy your merchandise. It would be like selling cars that a six foot tall man can't sit in the drivers seat of, without his head poking through the sunroof like a clown car. It may be fine for a five foot tall female driver, but a six foot tall or taller man won't buy it. * Anyone who accepts a teleport offer from someone in a room with ceiling heights of a realistic 1: 1 scale finds themselves appearing on the floor above, or on the roof, or embedded in the attic. This is because when you accept a TP from someone, you appear a couple feet in the air, and then settle to the ground. If any part of your head or body thereby ends up embedded in the ceiling, you're forced to appear above that prim. You can't change that in your client. LL might be able to, but they do it to mane sure you aren't embedded in the ground or floor, and getting catapulted into the sky or having other odd effects forced on you. * Anyone who tries to maneuver in a room built at 1:1 scale, while not in Mouselook, will find their camera is often skimming along the rug in the floor above, or embedded in or beyond the wall behind their avatar. Again, if people can't maneuver in it, they won't use or buy it. You can make many persuasive arguments for making avatars to a smaller scale. But the simple fact is that it's like trying to tell a race of people who are naturally tall to have shorter kids. All the tools for making Avatars are skewed to measure avatar height by the eye level, not the top of the head. And the avatars that we have now, Millions of individuals, have, for the most part, adapted to that flawed measurement. Their cars, their furnishings, their houses, their pose balls for animations, their dance animations, they all assume the current overly-large proportions. So what do you do? Double scale is definitely overkill. Builders who don't give it much thought may use double-scale, simply because the conversion is simple. But that looks TOO big, even when compared to our over-sized average avatars. I've seen some double-scale furnishings and builds that a seven and a half foot tall male avatar still would look child-like when seated on them. How I settled on 1.25 to 1 is simple. Anthropomorphic analysis. My avatar is realistically proportioned, and is, as measured by an Avatar Ruler, 5 feet 7 inches in height. A little tall for real-world females, but girls run to the tall side in my real life family, too. And it doesn't matter, with the next step... I know my real-world height. I know how tall standard architectural features are, such as a kitchen counter, a dining table, a writing desk, a door frame. I compared their measurements against my real-world height, and noted where on my body these things came to. For example, where does the kitchen counter in my house meet my body? And what are their actual heights, in Meters? Then I compared some in-world prim builds. If I made a prim that met my avatar's body at the same height as a kitchen counter, what was its actual in-world measurement? If I made a chair that looked proportionately correct for a "Ruth" male or female avatar, default values, what put their feet at the right height off the floor? Neither embedding the male's feet in the floor nor making a woman's feet dangle high above the floor like a kid in mommy's chair? The result? 1.25 to 1 scale. And that also makes a ceiling height work out so teleport offers don't end up on the floor above or on the roof, and so the follow camera wasn't in the ceiling. You still need to be a little generous with the dimensions of rooms, as a 10 foot by 14 foot bedroom, typical in many real homes, still feels very cramped in SL, if you are not in Mouselook. But it works. Want an exact conversion factor? 36 inches in Real Life = 1.080 Meters in SL. A true 1:1 would be 36 inches = 0.911 Meters. So my "Exact as measured against the body" scale is 1.185 to 1. Making it 1.25 to 1 covers the fact that many SL avatars don't even try to check height with an avatar ruler, but just shove sliders up saying "I wanna be taller than average!". Or push their height taller because they look like kids standing next to many of the avatars they meet. For a good look at a house built at 1.25 to 1, with counters and furnishings at 1.185 to 1, look at the brick house on the South edge of the RUCE 1 sim. It's an open demo home that is part of the Rutgers University Orientation Island sim. So why consider 1.5 to 1? Because that ensures that even the tall end of the avatar size range can still use the building, and makes certain that teleports never end up arriving too high. And at that scale, rooms built "too scale" do not feel cramped when you are not in mouselook. The RUCE 2 sim has 5 painstakingly detailed buildings in it, all at 1.5 to 1 scale. You'll find a realistically scaled avatar doesn't look terribly small there, and most "typical" avatars look right on the correct scale to the buildings. You can't mandate that everyone else change their camera follow height and distance. They can all set them however they want. You can't mandate that everyone should make their avatars a foot shorter, because most Players will ignore you, since the stuff they have now fits their size, or is at least what they are used to. If they ever come out with an open specification for the NEXT generation of SL... for something that is so much better in terms of avatar mesh, attachment points, and other desired features that the legacy avatars can not hope to handle, then MAYBE you could fix these "Scale Issues" in that version, when we all voluntarily leave all this behind, like discarded 8-track tapes, in favor of a DVD-quality world. I'd love to see that.
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Sorry, LL won't let me tell you where I sell my textures and where I offer my services as a sim builder. Ask me in-world.
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