Scale foor plans

I am trying to to build a house based loosly on a floor plan. Is there a rough conversion factor from RL to SL. I know there is not an exact but whats a good technique ?

Tina, everything just needs to be larger -- I would guess... 2 times bigger even? The problem is, "bigger than what?" The SL meter isn't exactly a meter apparently. All I know is that a typical short, 1-story ceiling in SL needs to be about 4 or 5 SL meters or else it's just too small.

Most of my builds, if I think too hard about them or observe really carefully when an avatar is standing next to them (particularly doors), they all are ridiculously huge. But if they weren't out of scale, everything would feel too enclosed and it would be too hard to maneuver around.

Approximately 2x bigger. I use walls that are 5m tall and that's about as small as you can get before the camera makes it look odd.

I increase real-world plans by a factor of 1.25 to 1.5. This has worked out well for me when re-creating historic real-world buildings in SL.

A 1.5 scale-up will take a room that used to have 8 foot ceilings and give it a 4M ceiling height, which is barely enough to allow decent camera movement and teleport summons to enclosed spaces. (8 ft = 2.666 M, and 2.666 x 1.5 is almost exactly 4 M).

I'm with Ceera on this. 1.25 or 1.5 to 1 for most things is usually a good ratio. 4-meter ceilings are practically standard in my builds.

If you want it to look good with the avatars, the factor is about 1.2, but the camera makes that impractical.

Im converting feet to meter and multiplying * 2 that seems to be a good comprise as far a the horizontal goes. If nothing else, its keeping me consistant. Still playing with the vertical tho...

Are you bringing a texture of the plans into SL?

no... just using a published floor plan, as inspiration, the wall and roof is has been total different,( Im not good at roofs ), why do you ask ?

Apologies for bumping an old thread.

I'm not even sure you'll see this Chosen, but how tall would an avatar have to be to start experiencing problems (cam position, etc.) with a 4m ceiling height?

Generally, any avatar should be OK in a 4M ceiling height, except for the prim "Macro" avatars like the 40 M tall Husky anthro... One of the test subjects that I use when designing buildings is a seven and a half foot tall male, and he can navigate just fine in a room with 4 M ceilings.

Camera height is less of an issue than incoming teleport height. If you offer someone a TP summons while indoors, you want a ceiling height of at least 4.5 M eters. When people TP in, they arrive more than a meter off the floor, then settle lower. If any part of them intersects the ceiling, they will arrive above THAT set of prims, which may make them appear on the floor above you, or on the roof of the house, or even stuck in the attic!

So, my rule of thumb is 4 M minimum, but 4.5 to 5 M ceiling heights is best. This results n builds that look more like Victorian-style architecture, where 14 foot high ceilings were a standard, and there was more open wall space above doors and windows on each floor of a building. (In the days before Air Conditioning, a room with high ceilings was much more comfortable in Summer, as the hor air would rise above the people in the room.)

4.75 meters is the bare minimum I use for ceiling heights, and that's just to save prims so I can combine the walls of 2 stories. When prims aren't an issue, I use 6 meters for "small" rooms (around 20*20 or less) or even 10 meters high if any side is 40 meters or longer.
The minimal height I use for doorways is around 3 meters, to make passage as fluent as possible (some camera bobbing will still happen at this height, but it feels more like a "marker" for passing through a door than a complete repositioning, which is annoying).

The smallest size I use for rooms would be 10*10, but one end of the room has to be "open" for this to be acceptable, as again, the camera is very unforgiving, and I feel it should be always possible to make a picture in a room of an avi standing up. 15*15 is a much more forgiving size for a room, and also gives more space for furniture while still being able to walk around naturally.

It's a bit of a matter of taste, but I do advice to walk around a lot in anything you build, maybe "live" in it for a week once you finished, to get a feel of how good it actually is.

Also, make walls at least 0.1 meter thick. A bit more would be even better. Thicker walls are much easier to align to one another, and on top of that, they just look more natural as well.
There is simply no excuse for 0.01m thick walls: they look horrible, are impossible to align properly, and you can't hang a picture on them without the picture hanging a mile from the wall or it glitching through to the other side when viewed from some distance.
Well, there are exceptions: Japanese ricepaper walls. But making those requires some different building techniques alltogether. And you're simply not supposed to hang pictures on those, or put cabinets right against them.

Ceiling height is also somewhat dependent on avatar types that will be using the build - I go with higher ceilings on my stuff because I do fantasy and have to accommodate large avatars with enormous wings and other creative paraphernalia. If you are creating for "normal" human avatars then you can go with 5m ceilings easier. I find 4 m too suffocating as it places my camera right at the ceiling.