Avatar scale is off from RL (1:1.2ish)

I'm sure this is a "known" issue, but I did searches on size, meters, scalte etc. and couldn't find anything.

It's not an issue that affect performance but it *is* odd, doesn't seem to be well documented and has ramifications for anyone building things by the numbers.

The basic issue seems to be that the default avatars are significantly taller than the average (or even a tall) male and female are in real life. The girl avatar sizes in at 6'1" and the boy at 6'7"! This elongated starting point combined with the lack of percise height readout in the appearance editor and the natural tendency of folks to be a little taller means most avatars are running at a gargantuan 6'8"-7'!

This of course makes building vehicles and building to scale more difficult (since you are either to scale and too small, or relatively correct but with the wrong measurements) and somewhat undermines the purpose of using meters as a unit.

I don't think there's much to be done at this point (expect maybe a gradual height reduction of the default avatars to realistic sizes), but I would like to understand if LL is aware of this and why this scale was chosen in the first place. I'd also like to know if the Linden builds are constructed to this larger size.

One possible benefit of this effect is that it allows users to construct much shorter avatars *realative* to the average height without changing any of the avatar or appearnce code (a 4' avatar looks like a 3' one realtively). Thanks!

I've noticed the scale problems too. When building my coin-op game replicas I initially wanted to create them with as close to the real dimensions as possible, but that would mean that most avatars would tower over them.

People just love being giants.

For some historical background, see Andrew Linden's post in this thread:

/120/4d/7240/1.html

LOL and why shouldn't our Second Lives be "bigger" than our First Lives??!

Thanks Jake! That's what I was looking for. Sorry to revisit an old topic but I'm dumb and I haven't been able to see how to do a search on *all* the forums simultaneously.

So the answer from Andrew Linden was:


^^;;

Anybody have any clue if in-world Linden builds are to Primitar scale?

The oldest Linden builds are around a year old at the most. They were all constructed well after we had mesh-based avatars.

As for ~6'1" being the default female height, what's wrong with that? Some of us are that tall.

If they added my "global scale" slider idea in Appearance, I think you'd see more realistically-scaled avs. It's hard to get the right effect right now with the current set of sliders. I chose proportions over height, because I couldn't make my avatar the right SHAPE while still being the right SIZE.

I wonder how hard it'd be to make such a "global scale" slider read out in CENTIMETRES.

I agree that this can be confusing. A certain fellow player (who will remain anonymous here ) insists on building exactly "to scale", where 1 meter in RL is 1 meter in SL. What this means is that these things come out much too small to be used.

How big is an SL meter, based on avatar size? Admittedly, it's subjective, but it would be nice to be able to take RL designs and translate them to a consistent scale in SL.

I'm linking this thread back to the design thread I started in. I think that's the place for continued disscusion on how to cope with it in designing - mostly since the "technical issue" aspect has already been covered.

/111/db/23648/1.html

I guess you have never been to the Netherlands.

Ooops, sorry for redirecting the thread!

I used teh "show new posts" button and it came up with Cubey's post twice so I though he had posted in both threads! I'll copy my answer from there to here:

Cubey... I think the conversion factor is hard to figure out because it doesn't seem to be linear. That is, the ratio of RL to SL for the two default avatars is not the same.

73" and 79" The averages should be 64" and 70"

64":73" = 1:1.14
70":79" = 1:1.13
67" (avg across genders):82.5"builder's tape avg) = 1:1.23

Milo uses 1:1.2, which rounder and not far from the average of 1.23 and 1.13 (1.1, but then again I'm not sure how much a rounder number helps since we're (ok dumb me) is gonna have to use a calculator anyways!

Personally I'm going to use the default AVs 1:1.135 ratio just because it's everybody's starting point. That's for vehicles and vatars and objects I guess... if I ever build buildings it'll be a whole different set of fudge factors!

I'm also not going to worry about fudging it when I make really large or really small things since a lot of the scale is fudged in SL anyways for building reasons and wacky avatars!