Avatar scales all figured out!

Yup I wasted too much time on this and with the help of a lot of folks I did finally figure it out.

The Male and Female avies that you start with *are* pretty darn close to 1.2 times bigger than the average guy and girl in RL. Lots of folks tend to be super tall or super short when they customize, but a good rule of thumb for converting real world stuff to SL or converting your RL height to SL is to multiply it by 1.2.

My earlier numbers were wrong for a couple of reasons. In messing around with it more I discovered that there's really a lot of different things that makes scale wacky!

Most people think of their height as the distance from the bottoms of the feet to the top of the headwhen standing up straight. This is actually really hard to figure out in SL.

First of all, when you use a script to return your avatar height it calculates it from the bottom of your feet to the top of your skull, but uses the default legs apart pose... so you'll actually get a measure that's slightly shorter.

Also the top of your skull on a default avie seems too flat compared to a real skull, the eyes end up above the center of the skull if you turn off your hair. So there again you end up with a measurement that is too short by a few more centimeters. If you have any attachments on they won't count either.

Finally everybody's avie is floating a little bit over the ground... so next to doors and measuring tapes and what not, you'll actually *seem* a little taller than your measurements say you are!

So... there you have it!

Was this the observation you were telling me a bit about earlier, Aestival?

Good to see you posted it.

Cool info, are you planning on doing anything along the lines of detailing overall AV proportions, like arm, leg, waist, torso length/width etc or perhaps even figuring out dimension differences between male and female AVs?

and yeah sometimes that floating thing is a bit creepy. You float about 2 cm off the ground and your shadow is usually on top of your feet =P

With custom anims sometimes your float varies, but even if you are wearing animated platform shoes it still only measures your height from the bottom of your worn shoes and not the attachment or the animation, so yes... no matter where your feet are it measures from the bottom of the shoe/foot

That's a good idea Ferran - I can see how it would really help to have some body shapes that are good starting points for different proportions.

What I've been making a big scale chart with the average hieght of boys and girls at different ages - all adjusted to the SL measurements.

I started it 'cause I wnte dto make some younger AVies, 8 and 12 year olds, and I wanted them to be all about the right size. I ened up fudging the scale as you get younger a little so that you can actually make a 4 year old, and have them all come out looking about right next to each other.

I'm planning on making a body shape for each age then, with the right proportions for that age so people can just easilly pull one out and start making their AVs with that!