Architecture matching the SL environment?

I've spent time trying to create "realistic" buildings in SL, only to discover that the trailing camera ends up behind or inside a wall when I try to navigate in the world. Enclosed staircases are especially prone to this problem, especially if they are spirals or have a landing in them requiring a turn. I dislike having to go into mouselook mode just to successfully navigate my stairs.

All I know about architectural design comes from reading _The Fountainhead_, which isn't exactly a design textbook. But the idea in it of matching the design to the environment seems pretty sound to me. Since the SL environment includes the trailing camera, I'd like to take it into account better in my building. Does anyone have any suggestions they'd care to share on how to do that? Are there any places to visit in-world where the designer did an especially good job at taking the camera into consideration, that I might go visit?

Thank you,
-Midori

I think there was a relatively lengthy discussion here involving the smallest size rooms you could make without screwing up the camera. I can't seem to find the thread despite reading it recently, but everybody agreed that "realisitc" room sizes aren't going to work for SL. You will need to build larger than RL dimensions, to accomodate for the fact that a.) most SL avatars are taller than average people, generally around 6 to 6.5ft in height, and b.) the game is third-person, with the camera back and above the character.

I don't remember the exact calculations people preferred to make, or the smallest sized rooms they found to work correctly, but my suggestion is to just to stand close to the room you are making, and frequently walk around/turn when making it. You want to give your characters room to breathe - and this might not always be 100% realistic.

Basiclly I would suggest thinking of the RL size you want then increase it times 3 to get a fairly good camera environment.

Example a rl 10m x 10m x3m room would be a fair size but in sl it would need to be 30m x30m x9m to allow the camera good movement

Some will not agree with this but it a matter of choice really. as a minimum I would never make the height less than 8m

Since there is no weather in SL, you don't really need roofs or window glass. A lot of places I hang out at are out doors, or nearly so. Visit Oceanside Bar or The Blue Note, for example. Take a look around Salsas and Boleros, or the rest of Gardens of Apollo.

Since locks essentially don't work, and walls cannot stop a visitor from entering, you can make doors and walls phantom. The best justification for walls and railings is that they stop people from falling off your floor.

Stairs and ramps are unneeded, since flying is so easy. I like lots of teleport stations.

As the other post said, rooms should be somewhat larger to accomodate the camera. Also, I like to cluster the furniture or other activity locations in the center, away from the walls. As you have probably discovered, if you go stand near a wall, your camera acts funny.

Then, there is just fantasy. Why should a building be solid at the bottom, and smaller at the top? Put your house on top of a 100 foot pole if you want.

I remember the discussion about RL sizes versus SL sizes. It was sparked by an earlier posting of mine. The consensus was to make rooms 1.5 to 3 times bigger than than they would be IRL. I have found that advice to be helpful.

I'm not sure how to apply it to stairs with turns, however. Making the landings big enough for the camera, or spirals wide enough for it, requires a tremendous amount of space. If the stair are open, it isn't a big deal, as the camera can happily be outside the stairs. I don't see a solution to, say, the spiral stairs inside a castle turret though. In the RW, such a thing is enclosed, but to enclose it in SL without having the camera inside the wall. I have to make the turret far wider than I'd want.

Which all got me to thinking that I may not want to make a SL castle anything at all like a RL castle. Rather, I'd want to make something cool and castle-like, that effectively deals with the trialing camera. Or more generally, to make SL architecture, not "RL architecture reproduced in SL".

I just don't know yet what that'd actually look like. Still hoping for ideas and or examples to help spark my imagination. . . .

Edit: Missed Lee's posting while I was typing up this one. Great ideas, thank you.

I was one of the contributors to that conversation on building scaling issues.

You don't want ceiling heights less than 4.5 to 5.0 Meters, because if you use lower heights, and if you offer someone a teleport to join you, they will end up on the floor above the one you are on, or on the roof, or 'stuck in the attic'. This is because people teelport into a location somewhat above the floor level. Higher ceilings also help with camera angle issues.

You generally want to make doors, rooms, hallways and stairways at least 1.5 times larger than 'realistic', to get enough room for camera angles, and to fit the scale of the avatars. Anything less is REALLY cramped.

Another factor is that not only are SL Avatars taller than real people, but the point at which they are 'measured' is NOT the top of their head! If you use an 'avatar ruler' to get the height of an avatar, the height it reports is their EYE LEVEL. Very handy for calculating where the camera needs to go for mouselook views, but it makes them come out even taller than you might expect. To find the "real" height of an avatar, make a prim next to them, streach it to match their height, and check the height of the prim in edit mode.

I once did a precise, to-scale build of a room, and the doors looked so small that I felt like Alice in Wonderland.

That's funny, 1 room bigger than a 512 lot. I think you mean feet.

From my short studies of what people want, or what they purchase, especially new land seekers, a lot want houses that look and feel like real life. Why? because most don't think outside their squares & They want to feel cosy and have somewhere to "snuggle"

I havn't read the other thread, but the 10m panel size IS the limiting factor. 2 storeys per 10m height. 1 room per 10m x10m, otherwise prim counts run rampant. You MUST keep prim counts down.

On the other hand, larger parcel sizes can allow some extra room so you can 'go for the doctor' if allowed and have 10m ceilings and 20/30m rooms.

(I shouldn't even post, I can sell anything anyway.)

Just picking up on this part, because everyone else has covered the scale part really well. There's also been some discussion here about 'building to the landscape' and this is something that, to me, makes one build stand out amongst the rest. To me, there's nothing uglier than someone building a great big flat 'base' to put their building on. If you live on a hill, and you consider the hill in your design, it'll look much more fitting and *interesting*. All your neighbours will have different ideas of style unless you live in a themed sim, so building to match the resident-created environment is gonna be a bit tricky - but making interesting use of the land features you have - that, to me, shows far more creativity and cleverness than just covering it up with a box.

ooooh. Compliments, I love them.

I had one more. Leave off the ceiling, and make the walls not too high. When you are close to your head and looking around, you see walls, so you have a place for art, posters, or whatever.

When you pull the camera back, it goes over the wall, so you don't accidentally get outside the room.

If you really need a deiling, put one up high, and don't extend to the walls.

You could maybe do this with a room with high windows all around the outside, sort of like my High School gym.

You could do something funny like put in an invisible collision block that makes all the main walls 1 sided while someone is in the room. Then as long as a person is there, anyone could see into it but not out. Not very private but kinda an entertaining idea .

- Jolan

I visited a furniture store that I thought was very nicely done. I went up a spiral staircase and remember it being nice to the camera. Of course, it's all relative since I run at about 6fps

It was, if I have the right memory: * Taeja Vu Designs Furniture OUTLET

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Kelham/17.2804/148.046

Not a plug. I have no affiliation with them, I've been there once and I have no idea who the owner is. And I didn't by anything. Because I'm poor. It makes me honest

I know the BSD Archer House was specifically designed with the intent of playing nice with the camera, per the notecard. You might check that out or look at some BSD projects as well since I would assume the same care goes into everything there. You might see some pros and cons. If you haven't seen a BSD Archer House, you're amazing. Until I figured out how the inventory worked, I had about 9 of them.

I think it depends what the use of the building is. For homes, traditional doors have value- doors have meanings, an open door is a portal, a closed door is a barrier. You can jump a lot of fences in real life too, but you know you're probably trespassing. So locked doors don't stop determined trespassers, they do define a space as private all the same. Similarly with windows- people seem to like to feel that their indoors is indoors, and that means sealed from outside- usually with blackout windows.

I mention these because I know from my time in SL that neither locking doors nor blackout windows offer a guarantee of privacy, but when people ask to see my houses, those are features that they ask about. I personally despise teleporters in small builds with no actual, spacial floor-floor access, they destroy the continuity of the space for me. I have made houses with flyable access between floors (once as a specific request) but I will always put a ramp or stairs there also. I did ramps in rand Columbia's seenLAB (video/media gallery in Hyperborea sim), not only for walking access, but because they are also parts of the design in themselves- more angles, more aspects to view from. The whole building is still "flyable", so people can choose how they interact with that space.

For my friend Nicky Ree's store in Deimos, I went with a basically open space- it's a courtyard surrounded by roofed walled sections- flyability is important for a large store- a lot of people don't use alt-cam to look at stuff, they fly their face up to it. So from the outside it looks like a big enclosed area, but it's actually pretty open inside.

I also made a little boathouse on a corner of a mountain plot just for the fun of it, and to cheer up a pretty dull canyon (Enceladus by the waterfall)- that was the kind of build I actually enjoy most- fitting something into the land that's there, rather than brute-forcing the landscape too much to drop a box on.

Anyway, those are some of my thoughts- my main consideration for making homes, is don't forget to make sure there's space for the hot tub

I agree with Ace's statements.

A lot of architecture doesn't really serve a physical purpose (such as keeping off rain, or keeping people out) but rather are devices to communicate ideas .. such as a request for privacy, a sense of intimacy, and an expression of personality (eg: I like houses from the RL .. ).

Some people also use SL as an opportunity to investigate what they want to see in RL house .. kind of a social 3D housing cad tool.

That all being said, the original statement is useful to remember, if you have a particular purpose for your house in SL (perhaps, a store), you may want to think about function before style.