Building Standards or best practices?

I'm a fairly new builder but the concepts for the most part don't seem to complicated... just take a bit of practice. So to work on my skills I decided to build a room of a house. I chose my RL living room as a model and started re-creating it... measuring everything and creating it as exactly like the RL room as I possibly could.

One thing that I noticed right away is how *small* it looked. As I build the room, I consistently multiplied all measurements by a factor of 1.25 to compensate for the fact that avitars are larger in SL than people are in RL. The other factor here is that your camera is behind you and above your avitar so your perspective makes things look small. However, even going into a first person view the room looks very small.

So... clearly things in SL need to be larger than life. How much larger? Do SL builders tend to follow any particular guide lines for how large you make doors? Windows? Furniture?

One of the hardest things for me to get my arms around in SL building is how large to make things. I know I could just stretch things until they "look right". I was just wondering what standards and best practices people use when building? If there are any

Thanks!

For me, I pretty much eyeball everything for "scale," But I do have some standards (probably more of a "starting point" or guideline than a standard), though my structural standards are based moreso on what works best with camera angles instead of what's best for Avatar heights. Avatar heights vary SO much here that "standard" here is anything but - look at Tinies and even a few massive sized mechs, for example, though it doesn't stop there. And if you've ever stood in - say - an elevator with your camera jerking every which way, you'll probably agree that camera angles can really make a "cool" experience a really annoying one.

When I build structures, regular ceilings height are 6-9m depending on the architectural affect I want (cathedral ceilings, etc, not included), with my "standard" being 7m. Anything less that 6m causes a lot of camera-havoc in my experience, and even 6m is pushing it in some of the more confined spaces. My doors range from 3-5m tall and 1.5 to 2.5m wide, with 4m x 2m being my standard (works well since most door textures are 256 x 512 or 512 x 1024). If you stand the avatars by the door themselves and pan out - yes, the doors look a bit "big". Unless you're a mech or a minatar or something. But... the size scales well to the rest of my building, and accommodates camera views very nicely, so I haven't felt a need to change it. Over time, I've just started creating door styles that make the overage seem part of the design on purpose. French doors and double doors, for example, are very forgiving.

Furniture design is a bit more concrete since I can really only build it for one size avatar. Sofa standards for me are about .5 to .65m from ground to seat to accommodate "lounging." Table Chairs are typically .75m from ground to seat, and tables are 1.25m. Of course, I may adjust each of these sizes based on how it winds up scaling to the avatar or the room, but I rarely have to deviate much from these standards. Seems width and length effect the visual appearance of being scaled to an avatar moreso than the height. Prime example is that I was working on some comfy chairs the other night for an office reception area. The chairs were scaled by my standards, but they just looked so small in the room, and a bit small for the avatar scale. So I made them wider (but not taller). Voila - they became as perfect as real life.

I think another thing that needs to be considered too in scaling is LOD, be it a regular or sculpted prim. Sure, an open rose SCALES best to 3/4's the size of an avatar's palm. But if you scale it as such, your rose becomes a vague red blob at about 10m, whether its a scultpy or not (though a regular prim retains it's visual shape for further distances than a sculpty, regular prims DO lose detail as you zoom out). So unless my avatar is holding that rose on their palm for a close up effect, I'll probably make it a little bigger than scale if I can get away with it.

Hope this helps!

~Moonshy Littlething,
PrimShy Designs

I also go with wall height of 6m - 8m to accommodate camera. I won't do rooms smaller than 10 x 10 and prefer at least 12 x 12 or sometimes 10 x 15. Having the camera bounce in and out of rooms because they are too small makes me crazy...

I typically go with anywhere from 1.25:1 to 1.5:1, for most measurements.

I disagree with the above statements about 6-8 meters being necessary for ceilings. 5 meters is plenty for where most people park their cameras. Even 4 is very usable. 3.5 is pretty much the absolute lower limit before the camera REALLY has problems.

Of course, it's a subjective thing. Often, people feel that if the ceiling is too noticeable, it's too low, when in reality, the actual height is not always the issue. Texturing can make a huge difference to the apparent openness of a room. If a ceiling texture is too dark, too flat, too busy, or otherwise uncomforable looking, people will get the impression it's lower than it actually is, and they'll tell you the room seems cramped. Throw a proper texture on there, something that looks like a RL ceiling (tiles, plaster, etc.), with good shading (VERY important), and they'll thank you for "raising" it, even though you didn't move it a single millimeter.

I can't even count how many times that exact scenario has played out in my professional builds. Clients rarely have any clue what they're really seeing. They just react to how the build seems to feel to them. The textures have just as much, if not more, to do with that than the physical geometry. The appearance of a nice lighting scheme goes an awfully long way to open up a build.

I normally work with building heights of 5.5 meters to 7 meters. For me and my computer, anything lower then 5.5 causes me camera angle issues even with my smaller then average height AV (5'6" in SL; thus, my preference to build at these heights. I think a lot of it is personal preference and the type of build your feel you are seeking to accomplish. Play around with what works best for you.

I am finding 5m walls to be pretty good. Anymore and the room seems to big and any less the cam issue and many house plants and other items will not fit. 5m = 15ft so that is almost 2 stories in my apratment building. The walls in my apt. are 7ft 8in high.

Generally I use 5 or 6m for walls, unless I intend to make cathedral ceilings. My av is around 6' tall and if you want to build efficiently, the 10m wall is going to split up into 5m walls.

My general rules of thumb:

If it's a "public access" build, and you want it accessible by the widest range avatars, scale it to 1.5 x real measure. This allows the people who move their slider settings toward the max to still be able to walk through doors or walk up stairwells. This scale also has the advantage that a 5M ceiling height looks proportionately right as compared to the rest of the dimensions. Great for making a realistic re-creation of a real building. For a "public area" build I test with a Ruth character, but also test access clearances, especially doorways and stairs, with a male avatar that has all height-affecting slider settings maxxed. you don't want to go back and re-do a build later because the owner complains that their 7 foot tall avatar can't walk up the stairs...

If it's a personal dwelling, I might stick closer to a 1.25 x scale. But I would stick with 5M ceilings as a minimum. The exact scale will depend on the aesthetics of the build. Sometimes I start at 1.5 and then scale it down a bit until it "feels right". Anything smaller than a 1.25 scale in the X and Y dimensions makes rooms that are so small that you have to remain in mouselook to navigate. With a 1.25 x scale and 5 M ceiling heights, your wall heights for each story of a building will tend to be disproportionately tall by modern standards. Tends to look more like Victorian buildings, with 14 foot ceiling heights, and more wall than normal above doorways and above some windows.

Why 5M for ceilings? Anything much less than that, and if you summon someone to join you via a TP, they will end up in the ceiling, and will most likely rez on the floor above, or in the roof. 5M also gives you enough height that the follow camera isn't in the ceiling.

I do most doors at 2M wide and about 3.5 M high, and hallways no less than 3 to 4 M wide. It's huge compared to real measure, but any smaller and you can't navigate unless you are in Mouselook mode. Your camera will too often be on the wrong side of a wall.

For furniture and for things like handrail and countertop heights, I design proportional to a "Ruth" Male and Female character - the default avatar that you get if you create a new shape, and haven't messed with any slider settings. the majority of avatars are somewhat larger than this, but any larger in your design and any smaller or "average" avatars look like little kids in their parent's bedroom... For nailing down an exact measure, what I do is to measure the ACTUAL height of a male Ruth avatar, as compared to a prim, and work up a conversion factor between that Metric measurement and what the avatar's intended height ought to come out to in Metric. Using that method, a 30 inch high kitchen countertop comes out to 1.080 Meters high. You can base other furniture measures pretty accurately on that comparison.

and there are a litle tool named "Builder's Tape Measure"
IM me in world Maurice, if you would like a copy of that object
- could just drop it in your inventory, but i hate to do that without former concent

... btw -i think it is silly that avs are so tall -proportions are so wrong.

BR
ab

You can always just make your avatar shorter.

don't be silly imagine the plastic surgery cost!

I tried making my real life bedroom! How depressingly small it turned out to be! My avatar's head touched the roof and when I lay on the bed my legs hung over the edge. I started looking about my room and could imagine just how giant my avatar was. I'd recommend that every try building one of their rooms at least once.

You mean plywood surgery?

Just goes to show how small my house in RL is... time to buy a bigger house!

I actually manage to build my houses with 3.8m - 4m ceilings with pretty good effect. I did build a custom house for someone with 6m ceilings, and it was rather intimidating seeing my avatar barely come up to the door handles - let alone the light switches I install looked absolutely silly at the normal 2m height off the floor I usually put them at, and made me look like a child if I placed them at a height in relation to the ceiling height.

The Builder's Tool floating around in-world specifies a ceiling height of 3.8 meters, so that's what I go by.