Building to Scale (Why you should, and some tips!)

Ok, what i meant is:

Builders tend to "build to avatar max-size" instead of "build to scale".

do you say, this assumption is silly ? At least this is what i understood from at least 7 posts in this thread where this is adressed more or less explicitly, see #1, #3, #5, #15, #20, #24, #50. They all mention oversized avatars as one reason why builds are "oversized". And i am aware of the "camera problem", see #2 of this thread.

My gedankenexperiment was just about what would happen, if a rescaling would be introduced and "oversized" builds would suddenly get "correct in scale" and "oversized" avatars would get normal sized. If you think further, then it becomes cristal clear what penny meant in her first post about the benefits of "build to scale". To say it explicilty:

"Gain of space": When we work with 1:1.5 oversize builds, then we loose 30% of the potential place for our creations. This becomes cristal clear, if we rescale the linden meter and suddenly see that scale gets "correct" but 256*256 sqm become 170*170 sqm ...

The point is, that it technically does not matter, what scale is used. But relation between avatar size and build size matters! Where is that silly ???

So my personal conclusion is, that building to scale might implicitly help to get less oversized avatars in the long run. Well maybe THAT is a silly assumption at the end If you think, that i was "burning oversized avatars into whatever" then you missunderstood me pretty much.

And BTW: I don't know where i mixed up a metaphor and if i did so, then please forgive me for my not beeing a native english speaker. And while we are at it: What is the difference between "silly" and "crap" ? And is beiing told to "say silly things" more polite than beeing told to "say crap" ? just wondering... thanks a lot

cheers,
gaia

That's the silly part. Just having the client provide feedback on the size of avatars in the appearance editor, for example, wouldn't suddenly change anything. Any result from that kind of change, or from a change in popular opinion about avatar sizes, would be gradual, piecemeal, incomplete, and would in short not be anything like suddenly changing the meaning of the meter.

Sure, the avatar mesh works better for avatars in the middle range of sizes, and breaks down completely at the extremes. In addition, if you have most people at or near the high end of sizes you lose the ability to portray large characters except by doing things like oversize AOs and prim avatars.

So: (1) avatar size does matter, and (2) even if avatar size was made clear in the SL user interface it wouldn't have the disastrous consequences your thought experiment implies.

You didn't, I did.

Argent, i suspect, that we are talking about 2 different things. maybe i should better use the word "unit" instead of "scale"?

I only want to make it clear, that the Linden unit is arbitrary. The 1 meter in SL is a convention. it is nowhere tied to anything. And because this is so, and because the average avatar is soo tall and because the max avatarheight is so high, the consequence is that builds in the linden unit tend to become "oversized". Maybe i am telling something trivial ? then excuse me for bringing all that up

The distribution of avatar height and the tendency to grow to the upper limits is something different. Getting the avatar height distribution more into a gaussian-shape with the peak somewhere in the middle of the height range, would certainly be nice to have in order to get the chance for more diversity. No disagreement here.

And now i will shut up

cheers,
Gaia

I'm talking about the thing that sounded silly to me.

This post is just great. When I build, I always try to build to scale, plus a little bit so that large avatars can fit

I build for the SL camera defaults. It's hard to get around that. Sure, I could wear a camera POV adjuster but I'd guess most people are unaware such a thing is available to them. I don't like unintentionally oversized builds---but I dislike even more a build that causes my camera to bounce around like a superball.

Cheers,
Nix

BTW: Penny, I'm a BIG fan of your work!