Looking For Assistance

I would like to design/build my own custom home in sl. I should probably know this but if I want to build to scale and have a floor plan do I use the standard conversion from meter to feet to build to scale? What tools do I need other than the basic prims and textures? Is there a basic footprint out there I can use? I have played around with a little building but was looking for some tips from some of the experience builders out there.

Thanks to all who can give me some advice!

George Flan

Having a floor plan is a good idea, but for a variety of reasons if you build exactly to RL scale, everything will look too small when you are finished so you don't want to be too true to life in that way.

If you make a plan in photoshop and place it on a "floor" made up of 10 x 10 prims it makes it very easy to place the walls exactly where you want them.

There is also a freebie item known as a builders measuring tape that has a series of default lengths for floor height, door height, average avatar height etc. that comes in handy for scale projects like this. IM me in world and I will drop one on you if you haven't found one yet.

...this is a very significant point...
...it's not immediately intuitive but, even though the average SL avatar ranges from five to seven feet tall, in third-person mode we're effectively from fourteen to twenty feet tall due to our high-and-pulled-back camera position; the six-foot avatar on our screens is reduced to a token icon with respect to navigation...while RL-scaled spaces remain perfectly navigable in mouselook mode, their day-to-day usablity is severely constricted due to the full UI only being accessible within third-person mode...

...a 1.5 multiplier is a good starting point for scaling spaces, although the actual objects with which your avatar directly interacts (doorknobs, furniture, appliances, pianos, etcet) should remain closer to their RL size to avoid looking cartoonish...you'll find that larger spaces often don't really need any enlargement to work well, while smaller rooms sometimes require closer to 2.0 scaling in order to remain navigable from third-person mode...
...in the end there's bit of an aquired art to getting things just right, but you should be able to start with a 1.5 factor and adjust from there...

I just posted a feature suggestion: Hide Objects Between Camera and Avatar that addresses this very point.

I suspect this might cause quite a mess because, while we can identify what each object and prim is supposed to represent, be it furniture, plant or decor, the SL client would have a hard time intelligently knowing what to occlude. For example, you don't want your furniture in the house to flicker into invisibility when you stand in front of it, while you do want to look past the floor slab or wall blocking you.



Probably better to plan out what you want to do inside the house first. Most of the rooms in a real house are redundant in SL.

Luckily it doesn't have to intelligently occlude stuff. It can stupidly occlude stuff... for example, it could make objects transparent in proportion to the amount of the avatar that's hidden, and even set a minimum occlusion percentage. For example, you could say "below 30%, display, above 80%, hide completely, otherwise set transparency to (%hidden - 30%) * 2... So, for example, a slab that completely hides you goes 100% transparent, a chair that hides your leg it isn't affected at all, and when you stand behind a counter that's covering you from the waist down it goes 40% transparent.

...argent, consider the example of a one-prim 'box' for the walls of a small house...if the camera position were stuck outside the room, and the walls were thusly made invisible in order to view the avatar, the avatar would be rendered standing in the middle of - nothing?..

One other consideration is to put in high ceilings if you want people to be able to TP right to you. That is because SL TP's a person in a few meters above your floor level, then drops them to the ground.

I was advised by an experienced builder that 4.25 Meters works well in SL as a height from floor to ceiling. Much less than that, and someone who accepts a TP to join you may well end up on the next floor above you, or on the roof! In fact, the upstairs bedroom in my home has a shorter ceiling height than downstairs. No problem offering a TP to someone when downstairs, with 4.25M high walls. But from the bedroom, with 3.5 to 4 M high walls, they either end up on the roof, or stuck in the space between the ceiling and the roof. Yet today a standard US home only has 2.5M high walls (8 feet). To scale, a set of 4.25M walls gives you 14 foot high ceilings (roughly), which is about right for a lot of turn of the century US homes.

Higher ceilings and larger rooms also make it a lot easier to get a camera angle set up that allows you to see what is going on in a room. With high ceilings, you can angle a camera up into a high corner, and see almost everything.

Remember when you plan your structure that you can't make a single prim that is larger than 10M in any direction.

In real home construction, hallways are often a bit less than 1M wide. In SL, anything less than 1.25M wide seems rather cramped. And some larger avatars might find it even worse.