Values on the appearance sliders.

Has anyone else thought it would be interesting to have values on the appearance sliders that translae into RL equivalents. Instead of setting height to a number between 1-100, we could set height to a real number.

Do you think this would change how tall avitars are?

What is we could pick real life shoe sizes or bust sizes, or shoulder widths?

If you had some better inkling of whay the numbers meant, would you have made your avatar in the same way?nWould this stiffle creativity or encourage it?

Really, I'm not sure that'd make much of a difference. You're facing several issues here of varying importance. One, is that the current measurements in game doesn't exactly feel psychologically correct -- which is why we live in a land of giants, seemingly.

But more pressingly, is that in order to do proper proportioning for the human figure or even more cartoony stuff, the real unit of measurement tends to be heads. The average woman is about seven heads to seven and a half heads long, the average guy is closer to seven and a half to eight heads tall. When you crank that height slider, the head size doesn't exactly follow properly. You can spend a lot of time trying to get the body to look right and proportional then subtly tweaking it to make it more unique.

Really, I've wound up having to get my head shape and scale exactly in the slightly-cartoony fashion I've wanted, then had to scale the head size around to actually obtain the height I was shooting for -- since you need to adjust the neck length, torso length, hip length and leg length to really nail it the right way: One head is your head, from bottom of the chin to the middle of the nipple from there to the top of the hips, from there to the bottom of the crotch and the rest goes into the legs.

We won't really get into arm length, shoulder width and hip width, since that's just completely broken -- especially for female avs. Women have more width on the hips than they do the width of the ribcage and men tend to be the inverse, however, following that tends to result in having ugly gaps in your butt/crotch area if you aim for shoulders being three heads wide. Arms.. arms are just screwed up, you gotta make yourself look slightly monkeyish to actually be proper. Lots of people have too short arms in the game.

Wow, that was a lot and all you were asking is for 'height'.

PROTIP: Making a cube the height of your head from crown to chin and copying it a bunch to make a body ruler helps a lot.

Interesting idea, Jake. Belaya's point it a good one - seeing some of the guys with incredibly wide chests, incredibly tall with tiny pin heads always creeped me out.

I try to stay proportioned. I have two shapes, one for my regular size (6'11", and one for my RL size (6'3". I swap out depending on the crowd.

Reminds me of one of the characters from the Puppet Master series.



I have a positive way to look at it, tho: "super-deformed" Japanese anime characters are very popular, and have YUGE heads and tiny bodies. So really, this is the inverse.

I've got one of those "Height Detectors" at the Shelter for the new folks to click on.

The greatest horror seems to come from female new residents, who click on the object only to realize that they've made themselves 6'9", (including their shoes)

I think real world measurments on the sliders would encourage a lot of folks to go with more accurate proportions. Then again, we'll probably end up with an english/metric debate on our hands.

Is there any particular reason people are so big in SL? In theory, I'm above average height for a woman, but in practice when next to other avatars I'm an absolute midget.

The avatar rulers everyone uses are really really old.

People are the sizes they are because everything in the environment is sized for them to be that way. Buildings have large doors and ceilings because the camera is floating up and behind us, and any lower and you have camera issues.

Any attempt to formally translate avatar heights into real life measurements will just make people wierd about it.

"You're too tall!"
"No i'm not, I fit into this door with plenty of room to spare."
"But the detector says you are 7'3"!"


Why worry? Make your avatar what you want it to be like, and if you want to be short like "rl short" (ie. 5' 4" next to a 5'11" instead of a midget like I see people complaining about, then find a tall person and stand next to them as you make your avatar. What matters is the context that your avatar is in, not what arbitrary numbers someone chose to define the feet and inches of the default avatar using that script back when SL started.

So far as everyone mentioning being over six feet and the like, as I stated at the start of my rambling previous comment -- it's more psychological. The camera and the environment have lead to people wanting to be seen more on the screen and eyeballing yourself in comparison against other landmarks, which also in turn leads to building for those sizes. The measurement of meters in the game aren't exactly a 'real' meter, either, so this divergence has resulted in the Land of Giants. I'm not sure how one would even go about fixing this, since it'd require retooling content to be 'right' or redefining what a meter 'is'. This is also ignoring minimum size of a prim in relation to an av, I doubt that plays an impact in this push to make avs larger, but it theoretically could.

Really, instead of changing the slider values, they probably should have a little box somewhere on the Appearence editor telling you 'Your height is now XX YY', where XX is meters and YY is feet/inches. This won't solve the proportioning issue as I outlined above, it won't change everyone's content to match smaller, realistic folks.. But it'll at least give you an idea of what the combined result of all those sliders will have on your height, since a good number of them play a part -- and that might lead to a gradual shift downward in size.




You just won Poster of 2006 for Pupper Master. <3 <3 <3

I agree with Belaya - it's a psychological thing. For some reason, things in SL built to scale just don't seem right - they need to be slightly larger. For example, Cereal Milk made a bunch of very cool cars - but I would never buy them because compared to all the others I owned, they were tiny - they were built to exact scale. They looked ridiculous next to the other cars I had bought, which were built more to the avatar scale.

It does heavily depend on the crowd you're in. While I do make all of my builds with lofty ceilings to accomodate the camera, my own avatar measures as 5' 8" according to the common script, and closer to 5'10" if I use a prim as a measuring stick. Most of the folks I hang with prefer "realistic" proportioned avatars if they're going human at all, so it works.

That said, I also have a 7'3" or so half-dragon avatar I've been toting around; while in principle it's not really any larger than many maxed-out ones, again, a sense of proportion (not to mention the wings) make the avatar "seem" a bit larger than it is.

On the other side, I've got a "kid" version of my main human avatar - no, I'm not an age-player, I just thought it was fun to do...

When I started, my avatar was 6'3". But then I found one of those nifty "click here to find out how tall you are". Needless to say I was shocked. I tweaked my height and am now 5'4". I personally wanted my avatar to be a reflection of who I am irl. Although I am still a bit shorter irl than I am in sl. However, I do feel damned short when I go anywhere. I do feel like a midget most of the time, but then again I am not tall irl either.
I personally would have liked to see how tall my avatar was when I was creating her.

If you felt your avatar was good when you made her, and didn't have any problem with it until you saw what that script told you... why does it matter? If you feel that 5'4" according to the script is too short, then it's too short! Make what looks best to you, don't change it just because the thing told you you were some height.


My response upon learning my avatar was 7'3" a few weeks after I made her? "Hm, that's pretty tall." I didn't change her because I liked how she was, and I still do.

Just becasue no one has mentioned it (except Belaya in an oblique sorta way)... What sizes would you use for this?

Feet and inches mean nothing to most of the world so if you want to go with the rational majority and match up with the game, you'd want to use metres but that would piss off most of the Americans.

When it comes to things like dress sizes and shoe sizes it's even worse. Shoe sizes in particular are just made up nonsense that is totally different depending on what country you are in.

My suggestion pretty much sidestepped that issue. The sliders themselves shouldn't be touched but somewhere on the window should be a little display of how tall you are at the moment in both metric and in standard. The main reason being is that av height is determined by a collection of sliders, not just the overall height slider, so it's better to have the total displayed than messing with the existing system.

So far as shoe sizes and clothing sizes, that's pretty much eyeballing it without resorting to the sort of anal retentiveness not even I can muster and I'm not sure the overall effect would be worth it so much as having decent height and a well-proportioned av using the head-measurement trick would be. So if trying to do it in any system at all is last mile, trying to account for a handful of measurement systems just wouldn't be worth it. Really, though, if it's that big a deal, providing overall chest and hip circumference as well as the length of the feet in that same little height display box idea I have should allow you to answer your own questions about sizes, anyway, as I don't imagine it'd be that hard for LL to measure those parts of the av for you, should they wish.

dont forget their ape arms which are entirely TOO long for their bodies to EVER look right!

I pretty much agree with your suggestions entirely.

The only thing I would add is that as an artist that has done a ton of life drawing over the years, the boxes you mention are not absolute. In particular the measure from the nipples to the top of the hip I find to be variant at times, and mostly anything to do with the hip area can be haywire since there are a ton of different hips out there.

The height display box area is a winner and a simple fix for the interface. You should put it as a feature proposal maybe as LL is always looking for things they can do that are easy like that and make them appear to be progressing on interface development.

Oh, certainly there's tons of room for variance, it's just a guideline. S'why I mentioned the variation how tall in heads people generally are. You're right though, torso length and hip length do vary and you don't need to just 'throw it all into legs' when doing your av here.

And yeah, it might be a good idea to suggest it as a feature. If I don't, someone certainly should...