Making real people

I'm thinking of using the SL avatar system to make flashcards of some real people (friends and family mostly). It occurred to me that, based on ordinary bodily measurements, there should be some kind of direct mathematical relationship between simple measurements (such as those routinely made for clothing) and the numbers used to make a body shape for an avatar. Has anyone made any steps in this direction already? I've tried guesstimating, but my results just don't look right.

I suppose you could try to come up with some sort of mapping but most people just eyeball it.
There is no indepth documentation for avatar builders that I am aware of. It's supposed to be more or less intuitive.

there's an item called a height detector that, when clicked on, will give you the height of your avatar as in real word measurements. it won't give you any other measurements though, you'll pretty much have to eyeball it.

To the server, the avatar is simply a moving box. The rest is client-side fluff.

Also, if you make something "real scale" in SL, you're going to look mighty tiny; A typical avatar is over 8-9 feet tall. Just letting you know.

LF

Er.... LF, most of the avvys I've seen - presuming we're using a height detector and presuming that's accurate - top out at 7 and a half.

Of course, there's the really silly high heels and male avatars can get a bit larger, but...

I find that even outside of the fact that avatars are huge, things look tiny anyway.

My avatar is 5'9" which is not that tall, but if I measure a RL object like a desk or a chair and reproduce it exactly in SL, somehow it always looks about two thirds size next to me. Possibly this is just an illusion due to the geometry of the game, but it seems like a consistent effect to me.

I suppose a makeshift tape measure might help?
A box with a simple mathmatic script that converts metric to inches, or feet, could be used. And have it update with floating text as stretch the box aroound. That could tell you its lenght in a linear fashion anyway. Similar to that height box thats running around in the game.
I did work for someone where I had to take paintings and make them life size in SL. I had the metric ratio and size of the real life paintings handy with the images and the results were pretty accurate from what I could tell. (Compaired to a human that is.)
So as far as our height goes I think we are about right. But I havn't really looked that close.

FWIW -- I've got my height maxed out and yes, I work out to be 7' 6" tall in my bare footsies (to the top of my head, not counting my ears). Didn't use a height detector, though, as I've had issues with those: just made a prim and tweaked it until it was as tall as I was, then read off the Z value and converted from meters to feet / inches.

Can male AVs be taller than that?! Damn those sexist LL pigs!

Jess

Get the people to pose in the appearance editor position, take a picture, upload it to SL, and apply it to a prim. Make a prim as tall as the person is to use as a reference. With "stretch textures" checked, adjust the size of the prim with the picture till the image of the person from foot to head is as tall as the reference prim. Then adjust the appearance sliders to make an av that matches the picture.

Sadly, the people in question aren't readily available, nor do I think they would pose in that position in skin-tight clothing. Family bonds only stretch so far.

btw, is there a good reference to answer the age old question, "What is a prim?"

Did something like this for my art piece "Virtuvian Man" which is on display at the Open Gallery Project. went even further though as i used a modded posing stand to hold me while adjusting a prim 'canvas' into place. Extra graphics work done in Photoshop.

Hi Warda, I've talked with you a bit the other day.
I found this information.

at 5'7" my avatar feels very short pretty often, lol