Reasonable room dimensions?

I had an urge to try to reproduce a small Japanese Tea Room. The real-world dimensions of such a room is 2.7 x 2.7 meters -- cosy but not claustrophobic. I rezzed me a box, scaled it to 2.7 x 2.7 x .01 and took a look at it. Due to the SL camera location and the "normal" 6-foot something height of my AV, such a small floor looks horribly claustrophobic, even before adding walls.

Could anyone share some rules of thumb on what dimensions work for small-to-medium sized rooms, to keep the cosy feel without being so small that there's no room for the camera?

Thanks in advance.

-MM

MY rule of thumb is 1.5 to 2 times the real world dimensions.. Especially for ceilings.

One of the biggest problems with "realistic" buildings is that the "chase camera" is located physically some distance behind the avatar, and up. As such, narrow passageways and "low" ceilings can result in many accidental incidents of the camera slipping behind a wall or into another room.

Of course, you should also take into consideration that most avatars are oversized as well. You'll be hard pressed to find a woman in SL under 6 feet tall (I'm one of them, and even at 5'8", I'm dwarfed by "average" women.)

With a room, you are pretty much stuck with 5m ceilings minimum, and about 8m x 8m.

Yes, you can go smaller than that, maybe 7m on one side now and then, or even 6m on one side if the views are *only* going to be in one direction but for most people it simply doesn't work. Camera angle issues. 4m ceilings are possible, but very annoying for most visitors.

So what to do about it: Pull some tricks.

1. Make good sized windows, proportionally 'too large' for the room if it were normal human scale. Only the architects really notice; anyone else who does shrugs and says: well, it's SL. It really doesn't help camera angles; looking in through a window is pointless. But it gives a sense that you are in a smaller room.

2. Wall-less, beam construction works. This way you get cam angles from outside and it's not a problem. Gazebos and such. Add some plants and some objects (but not too much), and you are set. Or just use beams on 2 adjacent sides and usually that's sufficient for cam angles.

3. Don't pack the room in with objects, unless there are only a few and they are a bit oversize. Filling up a space with stuff makes it seem larger, more complex. This works all the way up to sim size, too - empty sims appear to be a *lot* smaller than full ones. Minimalism lends itself to a sense of smallness.

4. Pull the same trick with the doors as you did with the windows - make them a bit oversize. Problem is, with 2m avatars and 5m ceilings, most doors make avatars look like children next to them. It's one of the worst, most glaring variances to deal with in SL architecture. Some make the doors intentionally look like 'castle doors' or something you would *expect* to be big to get around this. Use of arches is another dirty trick - arches don't have a normal size like doors do.

Just wondering, but could it be fixed to a degree with secondary phantom 'ceiling' layer in the room at ~3-4 m height, with only the bottom surface (one facing the room) textured, and the other sides 100% transparent? You still have then enough room between this virtual ceiling and actual one for the camera to go in, if needed, but when it's kept at level then the room appearance is more 'normal'. Then again, didn't really check if camera tries to wrestle itself "out" of phantom prims like it does with regular ones o.O;

edit: scratch that, if the virtual ceiling prims are kept thin, then the camera should generally land in what it considers a 'valid' empty space... and the transparent side won't obstruct the view, so it could possibly work, after all?

Oooo, great ideas. Thank you!

To be honest, I personally never make rooms less than 10m x 10m because of the camera. If it were me, I would probably build a couple of test models to see just where the line between cozy and cramped is for your taste. Put in furniture and another avatar, pan your camera around and see if the room feels comfortable and you can look at things without your camera ending up outside the building. We all use our camera so much in SL that you always have to consider this when building. One thing I have learned from building houses is that there is no subsitution for "living" in a building for a bit, you learn where your design flaws are in hurry when you spend every day inside of it.

The smallest size I have ever found practical was a 5M x 5M room, 5M ceiling heights, and hallways at least 2M wide. In general, multiply real world dimensions between 1.25 and 1.5 to get something that looks visually right with SL avatars in it.

Bear in mind that not only are SL avatars overly large in the first place, but the 'height' everyone measures by (what an 'avatar ruler' reads for you) is actually the height of their eyes in mouselook, when standing erect! So even a woman who is a 'petite' (by SL standards) 5'7" in height is actually over 6 feet tall to the top of her head.

I beg to differ. I've found that the lowest you can comfortably go with ceilings is about 3.5 meters before the camera freaks out. The ceiling looks low at that height, sure, but not low enough to interfere. Five meters would certainly give more headroom, but it's not a necessity. I build with 3.5 meter ceilings all the time.


I love Joannah's idea of putting in a faux ceiling at normal height with a transparent top. I've got to give that a try.

This is about as small as I go too. OP, I have a collection of Japanese cottages I used in an old Samurai village sim I ran a while back. I'd be happy to rez em for you to see what they were like. I did not have any tea houses, although I had planned on building one. Just IM me in-world sometime if interested. Otherwise, follow Desmond's advise.

MM

One reason for a minimum 5M ceiling height - If it's less than that, and you offer a friend a TP to join you while in that space, they will TP to the floor above you, or onto the roof!

That is a good point actually. My house has 4m walls, which I love for how they look. However, the first (and last) time I TPd someone whilst I was inside I had to wander out and point them down off the roof and towards the door. Now I just make my way to the door before hitting 'invite' - after all, you go to the door to greet your guests in RL don't you?

Excellent point. I do end up with people stuck in the ceiling all the time.

I still need to adjust the ceiling height on the upper floor of one of my homes, made by another builder. If I forget and offer someone a TP while in the upstairs bedrooms, there's a better than even chance that they will either end up on the roof, or stuck in the enclosed space between the ceiling and the roof.

One thing you can do to get a personal feel for what is 'right' in terms of scaling for SL builds is try to make a few common things precisely to measured scale, and then compare them to avatars in world. Doors, a couch, a dining room table, a queen sized bed.

I did that with doors - and found that a perfectly accurate built-to-scale door in SL looks so small you feel like Alice In Wonderland, after the first sip of growth potion! So I scaled the door up a bit, in several sizes, and came up with what looked 'right' in terms of visual comparison. I also compared what I had built in-world to measurements of me taken next to a real-world door (My avatar and my Player are usually the same height). As I recall, it was a 1.25 to 1 factor that looked best to me. 1.25 times bigger than actual measurements indicate.

Doesn't this make selecting and clicking on objects a bit difficult?

Gave it a quick try just now but pretty much yes :/ if the camera is in space above faux ceiling, the right-click will be 'intercepted' by the ceiling prims, even if they're locked and you check the 'select only moveable' box, which is quite silly because it doesn't even select the ceiling with such setup, just does't pass the clicks to what's past in on the line of sight.

You can still select and click things after you move/rotate the AV just a tiny bit so camera snaps closer to them and under the ceiling, but aye this can be irritating or confusing for people, i'd figure :<