Wall Scale to AV -- What is a good Height

Hi, I'm building and I keep running into scale issues. Meaning, my avatar looks to small in relation to the building I'm putting together. If I was building a grand building like a capital dome no problem, but this is a small size castle and I want it to have a comfy "real" feel.

Which brings me to my question...what is a good "standard" wall height in SL?


leesha

I generally use 6m with 3m doors, at .125 width....but I believe someone once told me bare minimum cfor comfortable camera control was 5m per floor.... otherwise is to cramped and the camera tries to kill you

i don't have a memorized figure - but i think i use 2.5 meter tall walls myself... best test would be to make a new test bod, make it the tallest possible, and try walking under a 10x10 'ceiling' set at diff heights until you like the camera view. that height would be how tall to make the walls, of course...

p.s. ohh, you meant in terms of floorspace and wall clearance?? lol gee - that's a tougher one. i avoid that mostly at my skydeck with mostly no walls, all railings... one thing i always find annoying is how sometimes even furniture will 'block the view'. :\

actually I was thinking more in terms of camera angle and such...also well what i call the "Alice in Wonderland Effect" to low and you feel cramped cause of the camera. Too high and it s like you are a baby in giant world. Sometimes it is a texture issue but I was wondering if there were any standards out there.

thanks for the replies so far! Very interesting.

the problem is dynamic range of vision... you can see more RL than you can SL becucause you eyes have a wider focal range.

in RL you tend to notice down more than up, so in SL people tend to have their camera ~1/3 - 1/2 more than av height to give the added perspective. but you don't want to have the ceiling in vie all the time, or constantly bump it w/ cammera... so another half at least...

given average (meh) heights of sl Avies... 4-5m ceiling look attractive...... now if only I could get 15 ft vaulted ceilings in my RL home... then again I'm not 7'6" in RL or SL

I use a minimum standard of 4.5 M, with 5 M recommended. Anything less than that, and if you offer someone a TP to your indoor location, they appear on the floor above you, or on the roof, or *stuck* in the roof prims!

In general, expand RL dimensions by a factor 0f 1.25 to 1.5. Normal modern ceiling heights are 8 Feet, or a little less than 3 M. A 5M wall is roughly a 14 foot high ceiling - Oddly enough, rather typical for Victorian era home standards!

Yes! that's actually what we usually do.

Increasing the ceilings level seems to be easy to think but, sometimes you find great buildings in SL that are less great because your camera is stuck in the ceiling!!!

This can be seen specially in areas with people from countries that have just discovered SL, people don't think about SL and replicate RL... so they make their ceilings at 2.5 - 3 meters high and make a build plenty of walls... impossible for SL.

As a rule I always scale up by 1.25 to 1.5x in everything I build.

If I stand here in RL with a 19" 1U rack unit ( +- 470mm x +- 45mm ) it looks out of scale when made in SL using the standard meter units.

The only time I can see a correlation between RL/SL is when in mouselook.
But as most people use the 3PP you will have to build to take this into account.

Recently I built a custom office/apartment for a client who wanted walls 9 meters high. I think it looks ridiculous, but I made it anyway.

But I have another question about scaling. My core business is furniture. I like to make sizes as realistic as possible. It looks fine when the avi sits in a chair. But strangely enough the same chair looks way too small when I just stand next to it. Is it some kind of 3d-deformation (if that's the right word)?

Most furniture does look too short (Not necessarily to thin though)....the things that I think match the sizing best are thrones, honestly...

The way I set the scale for most of my furniture is to start with a pose ball containing the sit animation (or recline, or lie down, or whatever...), and then sit on that with a default-sized avatar. I then adjust the initial seat or bed height by making a prim that works for the position the avatar is in. Ditto for adjusting the front to back sizing, or the size of a bed.

Some furnishings are developing an in-world standard size. For example, almost all SexGen Mattresses are the same size - roughly equal to a Queen Sized bed. If you build bed frames to fit a stock SexGen mattress, you'll sell more than if you make them to an arbitrary size.

I usually keep wall height at 4m.

In the Inventory->Library->Household folder is Builder's Tape Measure for reference of avatar and build heights.

I like to be on the safe side and build my ceilings at a minimum of 6 mts. to allow for camera freedom, and raise them up to 9 mts. for a high ceiling feeling. Regarding wall thickness, I keep them at 0.25mt for regular walls. If you're building a castle, I'd recommend 0.5 mt since castle walls tend to be thicker than regular buildings.

heh I build walls out of prim paper,gives more space, and is un noticable if you frame the doors... also makes it easy (and fun) to hide secret passages

I still don't know how you built that cave though Ceera..it looks narrow and cave like and yet my camera never got stuck on the other side of the wall and it was easy to navigate..it must be the angles you used. I wish other builders could do that ..I get really tired of having my camera on one side of a wall when I'm on the other.

Too big houses and furniture give me the hives in SL, and they are everywhere. In a normal RL house, 3 meters tall walls are considered "high ceiling" houses. 2,5 is the norm. An average hight of a person is 1,70 meters. I live in an apartment with 3 m walls, and get people go wide eyed when they walk in...

I would be really happy if more people would take the size into consideration, but I know it can be difficult to size, especially if you're used to working with feet and inches.

However, in an environment like SL I suppose you have to take into account that giants are a reality.

For all my builds I end up using 3.2m high and .16m thick walls. Which I think are the most realistic in terms of being to scale. They might not be the most practical, because of how the camera drags against the ceiling, but I like the realism.