Oh my god, making your av's shape is so damn tedious

I'm trying to get a perfect shape for my cat av and I damn near got a stroke! I always end up looking either like a carrot or anorexic. I don't know if I'm being a bit too picky or something....

Yes, this topic was just to whine but I had to let it out....jeeeeezz

That's o.k...can I use the same topic to whine about how SL is filled with 7'2" males with muscles like Arnold Schwarznegger and 6'11'' females with bodies like an anorexic?

I have this great little freebie tool called the "Av Ruler"...tells you how tall your avatar is in feet and inches. I keep my av at 6'3"...and am TINY compared to a lot of people--men and women--in SL. It's just really frustrating...

That's it, I took a pic of myself

http://img142.imageshack.us/img142/4457/one001gp5.jpg

Now, I need your help. I want you to tell me what is it that looks weird/funky (besides that it's a cat on two legs >.>. Be ruthless, I just need criticism.

Chosen Few, one of our resident gurus, explained in the past the reasons behind the problem with avatars and their relative size. To summarize it, the avatar mesh was accidentally scaled too big during production. It does not relate to the meters that the world of SL uses. Also, a lot of the sliders don't have a wide enough range - so when you try to scale it down to normal meter proportions, it doesn't come out well. And there's also the deal with most of SL residents caring more about visual aesthetics instead of proper meter dimensions...

Just fyi, that AV Ruler is inaccurate. I'm not sure off the top of my head what the ruler uses to calculate the avatar's height, but I do know that whatever it does use, it stops at eye level.

From my experience, the best and most accurate way to get an avatar's height it to rez a prim next to yourself (on level ground) and size it to match your desired height. As an example, I want my avatar to be 5'9" which comes out to be exactly 1.75 meters when you do the math. I simply rez a prim 1.75 meters tall, make it phantom, and line it up with the ground (or better yet another flat prim floor). Walk into the prim and then go into edit appearance mode and make adjustments until you reach the desired height. Granted, this doesn't help much in the way of getting the proportions right.

As for your AV Flow, I'd say the legs look a little too long for the rest of the body. Either that, or lengthen the arms, because they look way too short for that body right now.

This you might useful: http://www.geocities.com/sketchup_lessons/human_dimensions.jpg

I've read a bunch of interesting threads on avatar size and in world dimensions. For various reasons, things need to be built bigger in Second Life to get the appropriate fit and feel. For example, if I wanted to build, say, the Millenium Falcon, if I followed some of the plans that are available online, which give detailed measurements, it would come out too small for most avatars. So, is there a conversion that would get us about right? Is there a figure to use when scaling up the plans so that, say 10 real life meters comes out about right in relation to the avatars? Then it would be possible, I suppose, to just make a meterstick of the appropriate dimensions. Although that makes it tricky to type in the values in the properties box.

The alternative would be to warn avatars to reduce their size before trying to use "actualy size" buildings and vehicles, but I've heard that they get distorted at the smaller end of the scale, so that might not work so well.

I don't know about any set of conversions to compensate for people using giant avatars... However, if you're going to cater to them, why not build the thing using the normal measurements first. Then, when you're done, select the entire thing and drag the white corner boxes in edit mode to scale the whole thing up until you get it to an acceptable size for the avatar.

I'd thought of that, but too many prims in the builds are already at the 10m maximum dimension for that to work. But thanks anyway.

I agree, your arms are too short (or your legs too long) for the porportions. But other than that, I think you look quite fetching.

Try lengthening your arms until the fingertips rest at mid-thigh.