Average height for a man?

[ValorWhit]

What is a typical height for a guy in SL?  

I originally made my shape to be 6' 1" to match my real height.  I had a lot of people tell me I was too short and compared to some of the monsterously tall people, I was.  I have since bumped it up to 6' 8" but it doesn't feel right.  I surely don't want to try and be the tallest possible.  

What is a good height in SL without turning into a Lurch look a like?

[Alwin Alcott]

there is no real average ... no standard ...

You can be what you want in SL, a giant or a midget, and all in between

Make your avatar as you feel is "you"

 

In SL most objects are larger scaled than in RL, houses, furniture..and so on.. so to let your avatar fit that a bit it's also oversized.

Also because it's possible... people stretch it, the sliders of the shape invite to larger, so it happens.

[Perrie Juran]

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ValorWhit wrote:

What is a typical height for a guy in SL?  

I originally made my shape to be 6' 1" to match my real height.  I had a lot of people tell me I was too short and compared to some of the monsterously tall people, I was.  I have since bumped it up to 6' 8" but it doesn't feel right.  I surely don't want to try and be the tallest possible.  

What is a good height in SL without turning into a Lurch look a like?

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You've run into one of SL's biggest conundrums and a favorite subject of debate in the Forum.

The short of it is this:  The average height of an Ava in SL is tall if you go by the yard stick.  So if you don't want to look diminutive next to the majority you're gonna need to push the height slider up.

The long of it  I will leave that for others to bring up if they wish.

[Nova Convair]

Numbers are meaningless. SL has nothing to do with RL. Just look at proportions and relations.

Move the slider so that you feel right compared to others and the environment. I don't even know my height, it's meaningless.

There are of course different opinions and ways how people see SL. Ignore them, just do what you feel comfortable with. If you need to be the tallest then a 2,60m giant is what you want. You still stick to RL numbers? Go for the midget size. Just do what feels good.

[ValorWhit]

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Nova Convair wrote:

Move the slider so that you feel right compared to others and the environment.

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Easier said than done! 

One night I am dancing with a girl that doesn't reach my belly button and the next night I am staring at another girls bewbs

I could say it would be easier for me if yall were constant but when has a woman ever tried to make it easier for a man?

That's a joke, ya know.

 

You know how there is a hover slider you can adjust at any time?  I need a scale slider so I can fit with whoever I am with.

[Rhonda Huntress]

Oh, so it's our fault you're indecisive and can't commit to one woman?

 

Scale is out of whak from place to the next.  You can have a 100 slider giant and still half the chairs you sit in will make you look like a 4 year old at the grown up's table.  Just pick a height and claim it as yours.  No matter what you do someone will always -- and I mean always -- say you are doing it wrong.

[Bitsy Buccaneer]

You could always have a few pre-made shapes ready to go and adjust them to work better with whomever is around. If you are using a classic/system shape and non-mesh clothing, you can change quickly and everything will adjust with you. If you are wearing mesh clothing, it will take an extra step in that you'll have to add the new size garment first and hope it rezzes quickly. Make extra sure you're wearing an alpha underneath in that case. :matte-motes-smile:

My av barely reaches the armpits of some male-aved friends when she's wearing heels. That was as oversized as I was willing to go and almost enough to make it look normal when we're stood next to each other. They insist they have to be that large so they aren't dwarfed by other people they hang out with. It's all a bit mad really.

As you settle in, you'll figure out what works for you.

[Annika Velde]

I would say 7ft is the average but i could be wrong. My avatar (female) is 6ft which is somewhat small on sl. My male avatar is 7ft and seems to be right where it needs to be aesthetically. I would say if you're worried about it. Go to a place with a high male population. The Men's Department is a shopping event catered to men. If you want, you can always head there and compare your height to others' avatars.

[Marianne Little]

So true, there is much more diversity i female height in SL. Men mostly have tall and taller.

It is many more in SL among the females who keep their RL height, or at least closer to the RL height, while there is those who go for ALL LEGS and some in between. I try to get somewhere in between.

I look at the other women when I teleport in to a shopping sale like Collabor 88. I am not the highest or the shortest? Fine.

But I see a trend in females, they get shorter, while a large minority still are tall. When I started SL, 6'1 - 6'2 feet was middle or average height for me. I was never the tallest or the shortest. The majority was six feet+. I laugh a bit when I try on an old shape, I am shorter now, but not super short. And there is heels. Superhigh heels. They can chamge my height so much.

 There is a Flickr group, what's your digits. You can take a look there.https://www.flickr.com/groups/digits/pool/

If you have a shape with facial features you like, you can try some of the male digits, for example this: http://strawberrysingh.com/2015/04/13/whats-your-digits-take-5-the-mesh-body-revolution/

[Codex Alpha]

I demand standards dammit.

That being said, my shape and size is that of the default avatar size determined by SL itself.

I design everything with that in mind.

If I go to a real 5'8" size, then I look like a midget compared to all the super-villain, Minotaur-sized males and 16 foot Amazon women with 8 foot legs.

I also hate most furniture made in the world, because they are generally too large and make people look like kiddies.

Scale furniture and chairs look disturbingly small in SL.

I can fit an entire bar and nightclub in a default premium SL house if I build to RL scale.

Generally though, I'll build to scale then multiply x 1.2 to get close to average SL scale, or objects are too small.

I wish they'd just scale to metric and RL size though, standards dammit

Also there is a limit sliding the height scale down before your shape starts to look all stubby and stupid. and thats 5'8 and down.

[Amethyst Jetaime]

As other's have said height is a matter of choice.  Humans come in all sizes.  Concentrate on proportions. 

If your avi is human use RL human proportions to make it look pleasing.  Proportions are measured by 'heads'.  Here is a good guide for that.  You can rez a prim and size it to match your head and then use it to measure other parts of the body.  You can be a bit off on some parts because not all humans are the same. PLEASE though make your arms long enough lol.  It's funny how many men make tall muscular avi's and then have short arms making them look like a tyrannosaurus.

There is a group of people in SL that insist we should all scale our avi's to the actual size of RL humans.  Some will probably chime in here.  But SL is what you want it to be.  If you always wanted to be tall, go for it.  If you like short, go for that.  What matters is that YOU are happy with the way you look.  If you are, you'll be more confident too.

 

 

[Amethyst Jetaime]

LOL.  My RL mom is 4'8" while my RL dad was 6'.  They loved to dance and did it at every opportunity.  So it happens in RL too.

[Nalates Urriah]

At a quick glance it appears no one has mentioned the problems with the viewer and avatar height.

Let's start with whether SL actually has a measurable size and reasonable scale. It does. Just open your build panel and you'll find everything is dimensioned in meters. SL is generally metric. But, avatars can be changed to display dimensions in Imperial.

Regions are measured in meters.

As VR becomes more common the departures from accurate sizes and proportion in SL will become more noticeable. So, Jo Yardley when building 1920's Berlin built everything to scale - correct size.

Scale is a problem because of camera angle and an error in the avatar shape control panel. If you make an avatar 6'-1" tall via the panel, the avatar is actually 6'-7" tall... more or less. Those two things seriously throw things out out of proportion. Read Penny's article: A Matter of Scale. I was inspired by Penny's article on the subject of camera placement and wrote: Second Life Camera Position Tips.

In general builders have decided to use prim dimensions as the final measurement standard. To get avatars proportional and the actual intended height in scale to the rest of the prims I made: Model Shape Tool as a visual aid to help shape an avatar.

When building in Blender and other modeling programs it is important to get things scales correctly. Look at Blender Measurements for SL.

Once you decide to hold to real life dimensions, you can use RL sizes in SL. So, the avarage height of an American male is 185.6 cm (6 ft 1.1 in) and female average height of 170.9 cm (5 ft 7.3 in). But, don't expect that to work without fail. Some builders ignore scale and proportion. When you visit their builds, things will look odd if you comply wil RL dimensions. So, some of like Penny push people to build things to scale and keep then proportional. Explore her blog for more information.

[Teagan Tobias]

My avatar is 5' 2” without heels. For a long time I was always the shortest one around, but I have been seeing a lot more females that are close to my size, and some shorter. I never expected some of the giants I see around. I see people and expect them to be people sized, but like others have said, be what ever your comfortable with.
And if SL has nothing to do with RL size, they would not have used feet and meters as measurement units. It was “years” before I ever heard anyone say the SL size has nothing to do with RL size.

[Callum Meriman]

Depends which groups you hang out with.

Over the last few years there has been a growing trend towards realistic sizes instead of the 9 foot tall 5 foot shoulder hulks that need more land to support greater LI for their bigger buildings.

I rarely see 9 foot people any more, but then, I don't go to those few beaches where they thrive and breed.

[ValorWhit]

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Amethyst Jetaime wrote:

PLEASE though make your arms long enough lol.  It's funny how many men make tall muscular avi's and then have short arms making them look like a tyrannosaurus.

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No worries there.  I am lanky in real life so I made my avatar like that as well.

 



[Penny Patton]

Nalate linked to a lot of great resources, but I think you're going to find that the avatar size that works best for you is going to be determined by what you want out of SL and who you hang around with in SL.

No matter how you choose to approach the issue, you're going to be facing compromises.

Most men in SL are between 7'1" and 8'10". You'll also notice, they have universally terrible proportions. Part of this is that they generally lack any knowledge about proportions, but another part is that to make avatars of that extreme size you cannot maintain realistic/attractive body proportions. For men this isn't quite as bad as it is with women (who for some reason have a shorter maximum arm length) but you'll still run into the "small head" problem and the "stork legs" problem. Also, there's no way to make an avatar over about 7'3" that isn't going to look lanky and stretched out. There's no way to be this tall without "turning into a lurch look alike".

You can get better proportions if you stick to a smaller size, and so a more attractive avatar, and if you intend to own land or build, you'll find that building closer to realistic scale makes creating large/detailed environments infinitely easier. (There used to be a few RP sims like Doomed Ship and The Wastelands that actively encouraged more realistically sized avatars for this reason. Not sure if there's any RP sims like that around anymore.) But you'll be a midget around most of "the guys".

 

Add to this, most women these days seem to have avatars between 5' and 5'10" (most of us have shoes that add 3-6 inches so if we look 6' tall, we're actually probably closer to 5'5" barefoot). So most guys are absolute giants around women. Some girls are into it, some think it's a turn off, if that matters at all.

[Bitsy Buccaneer]

Just thinking out loud here. Could the trend towards smaller female avs have something to do with standard sizing mesh clothes? When they first came out I didn't understand what the backlash was until I tried on larger sizes. Those are a bit much. The smaller sizes were alright enough though and I could wear those with just a few minor tweaks. My av was small compared to other female avs then, but given the numbers listed here she's probably average now. So how many female avs started the downsizing journey in order to wear smaller standard sizes? Maybe some good came out of that whole experiment after all. :matte-motes-smile:

And what can we do to encourage male avs to scale down as well?

[Penny Patton]

"Standard sizing" was a travesty. People meant well, but you could not squeeze into standard size outfits without awful compromises to avatar proportion.

No, I'm pretty sure what really motivates most people to scale down is that it's impossible to make decent proportions at those huge sizes. Especially for women.

LL gave women avatars substantially shorter arms. I cannot even begin to fathom why LL decided women have stubbier arms than men, but they did. So once you reach about 6' tall women have to have that arm slider entirely maxed out or your arms are too short.

For men and women, to make yourself taller often involves maxing out the leg slider, which means you end up with legs far too long for your body. And once you hit about 6'10" tall it becomes impossible make the head large enough and you end up with an increasingly tiny head. Although male avatars do have longer arms, they still reach a point where they cannot make the arms long enough to keep up with their stretched out body.

 The appearance editor sliders are just not set up to make good human proportions possible at the extremes. On top of that, multiple proportion guides and tools became freely available to everyone. The "sweet spot" for height/proportions seems to be between 5' and 6' for women, 5' to 6'6" for men.

 So, men have a bit more freedom when choosing their height, but why do they insist on those super huge avatars? Well, one reason is that LL encourages it by releasing starter avatars that are over 7' tall, leaving the appearance editor broken so it misreports height (most TPVs fixed this years ago, but the official viewer has always been about 6-8 inches short).

 There's also a bit of a male stereotype at play. I've seen this scene play out multiple times over the years and yet it surprises me every time. A man shows up in a sim and realizes he is the shortest man there. So he goes into the appearance editor and makes himself the tallest. One of the others notices this and goes into the appearance editor to make themselves even taller. This continues until both men have maxed out their height, without ever having exchanged a word. The funniest time was four guys in a club. Each time one of them made themselves taller, the other three would immediately go into the appearance editor and gain a few inches.

 You see it in comments, too. "I don't want to be the shortest guy in the room." Women don't care about being the shortest woman in the room. They do care about how they look, tho. If we can make ourselves look more attractive by shrinking down, we'll go for it. Guys gotta be big and manly, even if it means also looking like an 8' tall inverted meat triangle with t-rex arms.

 This attitude is also why some of the mesh bodies for male avatars use deformers to make the men able to be even taller. Some of these guys walking around now with mesh bodies are pushing 10-12 feet tall.

[wherorangi]

yes. I agree with Penny, about how difficult it is to get proportion right.  Torso muscle is another one that messes up over tall women avatars. Female torso muscle maxes out at about 42-45 on the UI slider

i have always been 1.75m (about 5ft 8/9in) on the UI slider ruler (avatar bounding box) so about 1.85m (5ft 10in) on the true (prim) measure

for a long time I was in the short half of all avatars

since the UI slider ruler came into the viewer then has been a gradual shift down in height. The women have been going down. For all the reasons that Penny has said. And bc of the UI ruler. A measuring tape/ruler is a psychological enabler in this sense. The men have been following the women down since

+

back in the day when there was no UI ruler then the men (circa 2006) lead the height explosion. Basically they set the height slider to 100% bc I am 100% male, there not being a metric/imperial ruler in the viewer at the time. (again is a pyschology thing this and is not bad in itself. Is just how pyschological stuff can affect people). And when the guys did then many women followed them up

when do still see very tall avatars, both male and female, inworld and check their profiles then the majority of them started in 2006-2012 about

+

also the makers of the last 2 issues of new starter avatars have shorten the height from the previous. Like Amy in the latest issue is 1.62m on the UI slider for example. That height has not been seen in a starter avatar since the very first set of starter avatars way back in the beginning

which is a good thing I think altogether, for all the reasons that Penny has given

[Bitsy Buccaneer]

Forget I said anything. I was just curious about why female av players FINALLY started to go down after being at the upper end of the scale for years and was foolish enough to think I had an idea worth considering. I've always played as close to realistic size as I could manage without looking like a child next to male friends because that wouldn't be realistic either. Don't need a lecture on proportions like I'm stupid. Don't even need a lecture on why the man race escalated to gigantic heights. I'd really like it to be more normalised because basically any size I set furniture I've made for sale will be wrong for someone. All I can do is guess at average and hope potential customers use their imaginations.

[arton Rotaru]

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wherorangi wrote:

 

back in the day when there was no UI ruler then the men (circa 2006) lead the height explosion.

Basically they set the height slider to 100% bc I am 100% male

, there not being a metric/imperial ruler in the viewer at the time. (again is a pyschology thing this and is not bad in itself. Is just how pyschological stuff can affect people). And when the guys did then many women followed them up

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:smileylol: To bad there is no male genitalia slider, or I would have set that to 200 %. :smileyvery-happy:

[Penny Patton]

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Bitsy Buccaneer wrote:

Forget I said anything. I was just curious about why female av players FINALLY started to go down after being at the upper end of the scale for years and was foolish enough to think I had an idea worth considering. I've always played as close to realistic size as I could manage without looking like a child next to male friends because that wouldn't be realistic either. Don't need a lecture on proportions like I'm stupid. Don't even need a lecture on why the man race escalated to gigantic heights. I'd really like it to be more normalised because basically any size I set furniture I've made for sale will be wrong for someone. All I can do is guess at average and hope potential customers use their imaginations.

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Whoa, whoa, whoa. Sharing ideas is never foolish, I was just trying to share my ideas on the topic as well. 

I apologize if I came off like I was lecturing you. You asked what we could do to encourage men to scale down and I feel it's important to know why they make their avatars so big in the first place if we want to answer that question. That's all.

[ValorWhit]

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Penny Patton wrote:

 

I feel it's important to know

why

they make their avatars so big in the first place 

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 Don't try to over think it.  It is the same reason a man does anything.

Why do I have a pierced ear?  Because when I was 17 a cute girl said she likes earrings.

Why do I have tattoos?  Because another girl said she liked men with ink.

Why do I wear boots?  Some pretty thing said the clunking foot steps sounded sexy.

Which brings me to the original question.  I need to know the best height to be when standing next to a woman in Second Life.  For every 8' tall man there is a 7'8" woman that told him he needed to be taller.  It really is that simple.:matte-motes-nerdy:

[ValorWhit]

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Bitsy Buccaneer wrote:

You could always have a few pre-made shapes ready to go and adjust them to work better with whomever is around.

 

 

Actually that is so elegantly simple I'm not sure why I didn't think of it.  4 scales of me and just change out of my normal height when needed.

(edit)

Actually I think I'll keep my one height as it is unless someone special comes along.  Just be me.

Thanks for all the advice