Floor Plans and SL Measurements

Hello all, I really need some help figuring out some things.

Partner and I are looking to build houses and we have accurate floor plans, but what is a good method to convert measurements from the floor plan to SL measurements?

Any advice, known tools, etc would be lovely!!!

Thank you
Saturnine Dryke

A friend builds things with plans. He uploads the plans, puts it on a prim then sizes it how he likes it and works with the building prims off that.
A house might need more than one prim for the floor plans of course...or a mega prim. Might also have to cut the floor plans up in an editor before uploading. Make sure each section of the plan is the same size and scale.

I believe a meter in second life is approximated to a meter in real life so then the next consideration is the size of your avatar.

Buildings (and a lot of other things) tend to be larger than scale in SL.

Don't forget to add some space for the swing of the camera. Realistic ceilings may be too low to be usable. You'd be walking around while your camera is showing you the next floor above you, for example. For another example, you may want to put a bit of space between furniture and the wall for the same reason. While there are camera tricks that can be used to navigate tight spaces, newbies and even some seasoned people don't always know them.

Also, please consider that most avatars in SL are unusually tall. There are a lot of six foot women in here, for example.

try building it meter for meter, then resizing it up... this of course means you'll need to use smaller max sizes for things like floors...

the other choice is to use some default conversions
you can start with about 1.5-20*height, ~1.0-1.5*length/width

build something small, test it, adjust accordingly

don't feel limited to RL design concepts that are based on RL needs and RL physics

I second Brenda's points about needing more-than-RL room for cameras. I was very struck by this when I went to one of Coldwell Banker's virtual 3D repros of a RL property. The house RL was quite large, but in SL the rooms seemed cramped. Mouselook helped, but who walks around in mouselook?

I believe Coldwell Banker still has their sim, you might want to check it out.

I do when navigating enclosed spiral staircases.

Oh jeez -- brilliant! I never thot of that, and when i'm on my laptop with the tiny number of frames-per-second, I just fall off spiral staircases! D'oh!