Why do some houses suffer from gigantism?

[bebejee]

I have come accroos some really nice houses but both outside and inside they are built like for avatars thrice the size of regular avs, whats with this? make one feel like Alice in wonderland iin such places, can they be shrunk?

[irihapeti]

if the objects are mod then yes they can be shrunk downto the min size of the object/prim

+

about why some houses suffer from gigantism. Is bc they made for gigantors

same like why some houses suffer from midgetism. bc midgetors

(:

[mikka Luik]

As SL is a place where all can express themselves then yes some times others tastes can seem odd. As SL is also a world where all can shape their world then yes - they do.  Others sense or comfort with size may not suit yours. And as always - you can modify what you take (within creators wishes) or make your own.

Because of that - passing judgement on preferred personal environment is - odd. After all, some one elses ideas of comfort do not have to match yours do they =^^=

 ETA from wikipedia ... Gigantism, also known as giantism (from Greek γίγας gigas, "giant", plural γίγαντες gigantes), is a condition characterized by excessive growth and height significantly above average. In humans, this condition is caused by over-production of growth hormone[1] in childhood resulting in persons between 2.13 m (7 feet or 84 inches) and 2.74 m (9 feet or 108 inches) in height.

Feel free to relate this to a virtual environment. It should be fun.

 

 

[Pamela Galli]

https://modemworld.wordpress.com/tutorials/camera-offsets-penny-patton/

 

http://pennycow.blogspot.com/2012/01/improving-sl-camera-short-version.html

[mikka Luik]

Yes. Indeed. It was the use of 'gigantism' I was referring too.

 

[ChinRey]

I think both Mikka's and Pamela's answers are good.

People tend to like HUGE things in SL as in RL. They want the biggest car, the biggest house, the biggest everything! Big isn't nearly as fashionable in SL now as it was a few years ago though and most new houses tend to be built at a scale close to what Candie Apples's and Ryan Linden's Builder's Tape Measure suggests - about 1.5 times RL size. The people who still love big tend to go for a large house scaled up a bit rather than a small house scaled up a lot.

(Of course, one problem with a scaled up house is that it makes you look small by comparasion so you want to scale up your avatar too but then the house doesn't look as big by comparasion anymore so you need to scale up that even more and then you look small again and...)

The explanation in Pamela's links is probably more important. The default camera position is 3 m (if memory serves me right - haven't used it for ages) behind and above the avatar and there is no easy way to correct it. That makes it hard to navigate in close spaces so you have to build bigger to compensate for that. It is possible to change the camera position and I recommend everybody to try that. I was fortunate enough to come across Penny Patton's instructions shortly after I came to SL and I'll never, never ever go back to default camera position. It's not about scale, really. SL simply feels so much more real with the cam closer to the avatar. Suddenly the old SL slogan "the avatar is you" starts to make a little bit of sense.

Btw, if you're unhappy with the scale of your own belongings and want to do something about it, this might be useful: https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/MBAGR-Object-Resizer-v-521/6622985

[Bree Giffen]

The big houses happened because LL decided to make a huge allowable range for avatar height and left it up to the residents to choose what height they wanted. People are also free to choose how big or small their furniture and houses will be. Unfortunately, the end result is that you look like a leprechaun in other people's houses.

[Coby Foden]

Good article to read here:

http://monaeberhardt.wordpress.com/2014/05/27/building-to-scale-in-second-life/

I find it strange that everything in the grid what has been built even by Linden Lab hired moles is built for giants too, similar to this restaurant.

[Phil Deakins]

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bebejee wrote:

I have come accroos some really nice houses but both outside and inside

they are built like for avatars thrice the size of regular avs

, whats with this? make one feel like Alice in wonderland iin such places, can they be shrunk?

---

Judging by the part of your post that I've bolded, the camera position replies are answering something different to what you meant. Either that or what you wrote is an unhelpful exaggeration. Perhaps it would be better if you explain exactly what you mean because you wrote about houses made for 18'-20' tall avatars ("thrice the size of regular avs")

[Syo Emerald]

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bebejee wrote:

I have come accroos some really nice houses but both outside and inside they are built like for avatars thrice the size of regular avs, whats with this? make one feel like Alice in wonderland iin such places, can they be shrunk?

---

There is no such thing, as a "regular" avatar, when it comes to size. You have the guys that think scratching the 3 meter mark makes them more manly and their female counterpart, the glamazones, who literally aim for legs with no end.

And then you have some squished avatars, who may be far smaller than everyone around them, who are barely more than a pair of walking hips that could give birth to a bus with a annoyed head on top. If it weren't for their clothes and the hips, they their size mingles with those of child avatars.

And than you have a group of people who aim for their RL size, which can also vary a lot. And people like me, who have a size that could still be possible in RL, but is still taller than the average woman. And not forget those with fantasy avatars....or furries, or even tinies.

 

But I think what drives giantism up, is the standart camera perspective, which most people never alter.

[Ted McGregor]

Gigantic ? You should've visited the Greenies whilst you could .

 

But alas ... you can't anymore .. . :robotindifferent: 

[Christhiana]

I started a thread of my own about the subject of house scaling about the same time and didn't even notice this on!

 

http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Mesh/Build-scale/td-p/2870456

 

I will look into the building scale and the camera tutorials! Although I do feel 150% wouyld be a little over the top!

[Kelli May]

As has been mentioned already, camera position drives up house sizes as much as anything else. 

The default position, floating way behind and above the avatar, makes it difficult to navigate small spaces. If you stand closer than 2m or so from a wall, the camera tries to snap around or clips behind the wall. So you need to add AT LEAST a 2m increase in to every side of any enclosed space. That's 4m (over 13 feet)  to the length and breadth of every room. The room I'm in in RL is barely bigger than 4m total in length and breadth.

Celings do the same, so add a couple of metres to the height of every room... round that up to the nearest metre and you have rooms 5m tall. Keeping the celings high also helps keep the larger rooms looking proprotionate in size. Most RL homes where I live are about 6m for BOTH storeys (excluding the roof). 

So almost instantly, we've doubled the size of a modest room in all three axes, which is EIGHT times the volume. No wonder a human-scale avatar looks small. The proportionate increase on larger rooms is less, but still significant, and these are the minimum increases likely to make a space navigable.

There are other factors. If the builder makes the doorways almost as tall as the celings, as in RL, then these dwarf a human-scale av. If they use a standard door layout with the handle about 40% of the way up the door, then it often ends up at head-height for most avs. Even the eight-foot-six triangular dudes are walking around houses where they'd have to reach UP for the door-handle! The builder can solve this by making doors a sensible height, and adjusting the layout of the door furniture, but many I've seen don't.

Furniture can be a another factor. Often it's built for the top-of-height-scale avs. The size difference isn't always huge, but it can make some avs look tiny. More importantly, any object in a room in a potential obstruction for the camera. So furniture is usually spread out further, needing still larger rooms. Fitted furniture that comes with a house can be even worse: built to the scale of the room, kitchen counters are sometimes a couple of metres high.

There are other factors. Avatars move at outdoor walking speeds (a fast march) all the time, which makes them harder to control in tight spaces. The movement controls don't help (although mouse-steering improves things considerably). And yes, we often want bigger, better, finer and MORE for our virtual lives. I still think the camera controls are the worst culprit, followed by (some) builders failing to understand how to compensate for the required larger room size (hint: don't scale EVERYTHING up by the same factor).

 

 

[Perrie Juran]

 

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TDD123 wrote:

Gigantic ? You should've visited the Greenies whilst you could .

 

But alas ... you can't anymore .. . :robotindifferent: 

---

Greenies was awesome. I do miss it.  And I know, threadjacking now, another location was Sabine Stonebender's Zero Point.  The only video I've found so far doing a brief search is this short of his 'Vomit Comet' ride.  I've found this one other Blog Post about Zero Point.

But specifically to the topic at hand, this discussion goes all the way back to 2003.  Especially note Andrew Linden's comment.  We started out with an Ava where the center line settings were already oversized.  That is when, if they could have, the changes should have been made.  I think they didn't realise the long term implications.  Though that's just my two cent's worth.

[Ceka Cianci]

omg i remember buying my first house in sl and it being a good roomy two story log cabin.It was nice inside..

Then bought living room furniture for it..when i sat the couch down it was like.

omg Now that is a big couch!

I need a bigger house!!

hehehe

I felt like a toddler on this couch with my legs shooting straight out..

I just deleted the furniture and bought the same things that were in the show room with the house..

hehehe

[Madelaine McMasters]

---

Ceka Cianci wrote:

I felt like a toddler on this couch with my legs shooting straight out..

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[Pussycat Catnap]

I shrink almost every building I buy by a factor of 0.73 to 0.83 (I drop a script into things that lets me do this by the numbers:  http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Linkset_resizer ). I get everything down to fit my avatar.

As a result I often can shave off about 10-40% of the land impact, and have more room left over for other things to cram in there.

I do this by comparing something in the build to its real world version:

http://www.dimensionsinfo.com/standard-door-dimensions/

- A door for example, should be 2.03m tall. If the door in something I bought is 3m tall, then I resize the build by (2.03/3 = ) 0.67666666666667.

Google will help you find other common dimensions like table and chair heights, bed sizes, etc...

Most posed based furniture these days comes with a notecard for position - that is usually Mod. So I then edit the notecard in a similar manner to put in the proper positions for everything after using their 'adjust menu' to find where I want to be. I do this instead of 'saving' my position with the menus, to keep script memory use lower (just an assumption that those saves are all in active memory... not sure on that).

 

I found Penny's Camera settings to be too 'video game' in feel, so I have made my own designed to make me feel like I'm seeing SL from my AV's position:

https://catnapkitty.wordpress.com/getting-started-in-second-life/#Camera_Setup

- That starts with Penny's, and then has mine for the back, front, and side camera - as well as the View Angle and Distance perspective modification you need to make to keep the sides of your camera from being distorted:

 

Rear Camera:
CameraOffsetRearView
X: -2.5
Y: -0.100
Z: -0.300
FocusOffsetRearView
X: 0.4
Y: -0.100
Z: 0.100

Front Camera:
FocusOffsetFrontView
X: 0.5
Y: 0
Z: 0.3

CameraOffsetFrontView
X: 2.1
Y: 0
Z: -0.2

Side Camera:
FocusOffsetGroupView
X: 0.1
Y: 0
Z: 0.2

CameraOffsetGroupView
X: 0.5
Y: 2.3
Z: -0.3

[irihapeti]

have noticed that avatars are getting smaller

when I played the last time on SL at 1.75m tall (which has always been my about default height) by the LL viewer shape editor ruler (which means I am about 6ft 3in by prim imperial) I was pretty squiddy compared to most other people. Like most times I be the shortest person (adult human) in a group

since this last year I notice now that is a lot more people shorter than me. And I hardly ever see really really tall avatars (like maxxed out height length on the sliders) which was pretty much standard before

i think it has to do with arm length and mesh

prim and sculpt used to disguise the short arms quite a lot. Like a dress/skirt/gown for example. Most often when your arms by your side then your hands inside the flexis of your skirt. So cant see clearly how short they actual are. When the anim raises your arms/hands upwards then is not as noticeable either

short arms are more noticeable now than before bc of the way mesh dresses/skirts/gowns are made. Like the skirt is more form fitting at the waist/hip/upper thigh area. Like with mesh flared skirts they tend to flare out lower now than they did with flex

+

so I was on this dance line the other day. Was about 20 people altogether on the line. 6 guys. I was about the 14th tallest person. When not count the guys who are always taller than me pretty much then, I was nearly the middle height on the line

this was at a event where was all normal looking human avatars of the soccer mom with some shiny variety

[starladustangel]

I have noticed this as well. A lot of houses I feel like I am in a giant cavern.  The rooms are huge and the ceilings high. I've found if you don't a large piece of land, that many of the houses that will fit are one or two rooms because many home builder do build on a larger scale meaning that if you need a house for a 1024 m plot that feels like a house and is nice, it's not easy. Not impossible though.

 There are many homes that don't feel like a giant's home but are still nice. You just have to look for them. I have an odd L shaped 1536 plot that I need a 1024 home for. Some homes I love in my inventory that don't feel giant (at least not to me) and will fit on my land include La Galleria's Blue Bonnet Cottage, By Dorian's Tumbleweed tiny house (the store has some lovely cottages and farmhouses too) and Roost's Dillhurst House.  Currently I have Barnesworth Anubis's Lakeside Cottage rezzed and love it. All of these feel like a good scale to me. Furniture fits nicely and the rooms feel realistically sized.

I think a good scale may just depend on avatar size though.

[Pamela Galli]

I think avis are getting smaller overall, too, but I had assumed it was that word is getting out about camera position. I periodically send information about it to my group; I sent them a link to my blog article today, prompted by these threads.  (Here is the link to the article  

 

http://lagalleriasl.blogspot.com/2013/06/cut-mesh-prims-by-changing-your-camera.html

 

ETA: I cant seem to make the link to the article work.

[bebejee]

It has nothing to do with camera angles, the houses are just off scale, tubs the size of boats when you sit in them kind of off scale, and that chair, table and sofa examples given above.

Even in marketplace product reviews people have complained about this.

[Pamela Galli]

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bebejee wrote:

It has nothing to do with camera angles, the houses are just off scale, tubs the size of boats when you sit in them kind of off scale, and that chair, table and sofa examples given above.

Even in marketplace product reviews people have complained about this.

---

There may be people who just randomly decided everything should be huge for no apparent reason, but for most of SL scale is dictated by the camera, for the reasons explained in the linked articles as well as in some of the posts either in this thread or the other.  The default camera position is like having a kite flying above and behind you everywhere you go, and having it get stuck behind walls.

 

As far as marketplace review complaints about scale, most people in SL advise not to buy until you try. There is no point in buying a house / furnitur eout of scale to your avatar when you can either try them out inworld before buying, OR decline to buy.

[irihapeti]

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Pamela Galli wrote:

I think avis are getting smaller overall, too, but I had assumed it was that word is getting out about camera position.

---

this is playing a part as well. Penny and lots others (yourself included) know about proportion and relativity. Which I think has been communicated quite widely and people are now more aware of this themselfs. You have been helping with this communication and understanding as well

building houses to meet the challenge of avatar proportion (like furniture, door and window heights, etc) while also building for the constraints of the camera is not easy to do. And getting the aesthetic balance right to satisfy the critical eye of the ordinary every day soccer mom. Not easy at all

+

i dont mean soccer mom in any negative way. I mean in a positive way

SL soccer moms no different from RL soccer moms. They one and the same people

they know value for money when they see it. They are loyal to brands what meet the quite exacting standards that they also hold for themselfs. Like what they wear, where they live and what furnishings they have inworld. Same standards they have for themselfs outworld

that while they know value for money they are not adverse to spending heaps of money for that value

 

 

[Phil Deakins]

I see you've been back to this thread that you started, but you haven't answered the question that I asked you. If you won't explain exactly what you mean, why would anyone bother to answer you? Your first post talked about houses made for 18'-20' avatars. Taking you at your word, why would you even ask about those houses since they are obviously madde for giants? So perhaps you'd like to start again and tell us exactly what you mean - without exaggerating things.

[Kelli May]

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Phil Deakins wrote:

I see you've been back to this thread that you started, but you haven't answered the question that I asked you. If you won't explain exactly what you mean, why would anyone bother to answer you? Your first post talked about houses made for 18'-20' avatars. Taking you at your word, why would you even ask about those houses since they are obviously madde for giants? So perhaps you'd like to start again and tell us exactly what you mean - without exaggerating things.

---

Hyperbole (/haɪˈpɜrbəliː/ hy-pur-bə-lee;[1] Greek: ὑπερβολή hyperbolē, "exaggeration") is the use of exaggeration as a rhetorical device or figure of speech. It may be used to evoke strong feelings or to create a strong impression, but is not meant to be taken literally.

(my bold)

The rest of us seemed to think the OP's meaning was pretty clear and didn't see the need to be pedantic about it.