Jo Yardley Posted April 8, 2011 Share Posted April 8, 2011 This too is an old topic from the old forum if I'm not mistaken.But because it is such an importat subject, I thought I'd move it over to the new forum.So... it is pretty tricky to find out how tall your avatar really is.The avatart editor gives some sort of measurement and there are a few measure devices out there, but these generally all count the invisible box around avatars, the bounding box.I've found that the only real way to find out how tall your avatar is, is by creating a (phantom) prim box that is as tall as your avatar is and check the measurements on that prim.Most measurement devices still give a height that is not close to the height you get with prim cube.Or has one finally been made that gives a very very accurate measurement? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rhonda Huntress Posted April 8, 2011 Share Posted April 8, 2011 Yep, measuring with a prim by hand is the only way to get a true height. This is called your prim height. I have seen a few scripted devices that are supposed to tell you your prim height, but what they actually do is add a constant to your scripted height. I have seen this be as much as 9" over your script height. But you have to understand, the peole who make these things are trying to convience the avarage resident that they are too tall or over scale. I don't know what my llGetAgentSize() is but by using a prim, I am 2" taller than the height given under edit shape. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Persephone Emerald Posted April 8, 2011 Share Posted April 8, 2011 Couldn't we just go to 1920s Berlin & stand by the measuring stick in the train station? Serriously, though, I had to slide down to the lowest possible height in my Edit menu to reach a "normal" height. Normally I try to stay at 50, but even then most clothes are too big for me. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jo Yardley Posted April 8, 2011 Author Share Posted April 8, 2011 Yes The measuring picture at our sim is pretty perfect. But it would be nice to have a script in SL that could tell people. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Penny Patton Posted April 9, 2011 Share Posted April 9, 2011 There are scripts that are pretty close to accurate. They use math fudges to take agent height and translate it into avatar height. Thwey're not entirely accurate, but they're about as close as someone would get standing in front of a measuring prim. The most accurate way is to hop on a pose stand that leaves your avatar standing straight. Take off shoes and hair then stretch a prim from the bottom of your feet up to the top of your avatar's skull. My own avatar is about 5'7"/173cm tall. This is taller than average for a woman in the physical world, but it makes me a midget in SL. It's worth noting, however, that this has a huge advantage if you own land. Combined with better camera placement I'm able to fit four times as much content into a given amount of land when I build to my own avatar's proportions/camera. That saves me a substantial amount of real money by making land more useful overall. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Persephone Emerald Posted April 9, 2011 Share Posted April 9, 2011 Good point, Penny. SL residents would have more space for furniture & camera views if they'd shrink down to more reasonable sizes. For instance, if you want to build a low-prim house, a 10 m high wall is tall enough for two 5 m high rooms, which is plenty tall enough if your avatar is under 2m tall. Begin shorter thus saves on prims as well as on space. Unfortunately most clothing is still made for tall & skinny Amazon women. My avi is around 5' 7", based on my Edit Appearance menu, but I still have to shrink my prim clothing attachments to fit into my clothes. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jo Yardley Posted April 9, 2011 Author Share Posted April 9, 2011 I got a realistic scale avatar as soon as I realised how freakishly tall my avatar was and when I then started to build my sim I decided to go for semi real scale buildings. We have few rooms that are higher then 5 meters tall, often I build houses with two floors with 8 meter tall walls. The poor people sometimes even live in rooms that are 3.5 meters high. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Penny Patton Posted April 9, 2011 Share Posted April 9, 2011 I generally put ceilings for average size rooms at about 3m high, poossibly as high as 3.5m. Rarely higher than that unless it's the kind of room that calls for it, like a warehouse, barn, auditorium or something along those lines. Jo, I sent you my scripted camera HUD some time ago, yus? It makes living in 1=1 scale sims easy. Just the other day I dug an old steampunk zeppilin out of my inventory, I used to not be able to do anything inside the cabin, it was too small for the camera to fit, my old 6'+ shape barely fit in it (I thought I was shorter due to the agent high confusion), but now, with my 5'7" shape and my improved camera I was able to navigate the entire cabin with ease. The cabin was only like 3x5m! The ceiling has to be under 3m. It's astounding how little game design sense is employed by LL, camera placement is not only important but critically so. It changes everything! Regarding clothing attachments, yeah. These days I tend to build to a specifically created shape I made, it's the smallest adult shape in my inventory, under 5'/152cm tall. I use this shape to make attachments because if I build them to that scale then pretty much any avatar should be able to scale them to their size with no problem. Content creators should be aware that it's always easy to scale an attachment up, but it can be outright impossible to scale one down without practically rebuilding it prim by prim. When you build large you are building for only those avatars who are your size or larger. When you build small you are building for the entire grid. There's really no excuse, any content creator worth their prims ought to be building attachments small for this reason. It can also be considered "future proofing" one's products in case LL ever decides to get serious about marketing SL and decides to address SL's presentation issues by providing better shapes/avatars to new users among other fixes. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kolby Nissondorf Posted April 10, 2011 Share Posted April 10, 2011 I was never really concerned with my avatars height, mostly because I know I am over 8' tall in SL, but I would like to know my acutal height. How do you measure with the prim? Do you take the Z size as meters or feet and the convert it? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jo Yardley Posted April 10, 2011 Author Share Posted April 10, 2011 Stand on a flat surface, a big flat prim will do. Rez a prim directly on top of it, so you can be sure it is flat on the same surface as you're standing on. Right click and edit the kube. Make it phantom so you can stand "inside" it. Click the blue dot on the top and pul it up till it just covers the top of your head. The edit window will now tell you how tall this prim (and thus you) is, in centimeters. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Penny Patton Posted April 11, 2011 Share Posted April 11, 2011 Everything in SL is measured in metres. When you rez a prim, the cube defaults to 0.500m, half a metre, or 50cm.So if you stretch a prim up from your feet to your head and you get 2.180 for the prim size, that means your avatar is 218cm tall. I still recommend using a pose stand to get the most accurate measurement, very few AO stands have you standing perfectly straight, and it's a pain to get the default stand up straight as it likes to look all over the place. Also, remember to take off your shows and hair to get the most accurate measurement. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LittleFish Starlight Posted April 12, 2011 Share Posted April 12, 2011 Why go for a measurment ? I dont trust the numbers some math told me about my shape in the edit... i do my ava size compared to other avas. For example... If i am one headsize smaller than my partner in rl i would go for it in sl too... even if that means i would be a 2.25m amazon (told by the numbers of some script or primmeasurment) because my partners ava is 2.40m. For me it looks real and well sized in this moment. I wont reduce my ava size because of some poutface dwarfes they try to get their real hight like in rl by using the measurment in sl. If LL would change some math that the highest ava size cant be higher than 2.10m without shoes for example (just shown in the edit with the same ava size like before ... so just numbers), all the real hight avas would be 1.50m and less. I believe no one would make his or her ava lower than 1.70m as long as it shouldnt be an child or teenie ava. And aslong my sl bed isnt smaller than my ava i think everything is correct to get a real feeling. I tried to get my real hight too before, but then even a pillow was taller than me... so "pfffff" on the numbers Its just the problem of what you see with your eyes in world compared to other and the unreal numbers shown by some math. Like i said, if LL would change some math that a 10x10m cube isnt 10x10 anymore but 7x7 without reducing the real shown size in world (so just the numbers) no one would get confused anymore. If someone would get the idea in RL to change the measurment to the half i wouldnt even hit 90cm... i will feel to small just because of the numbers shown on the stick. So for me, dont trust the numbers, trust what you see with your eyes compared to others. It isnt my fault that real hight ava looks like a dwarf compared to me because i made my shape realistic to the hight of me in rl compared to my partner... also it isnt the fault of the 'dwarfs' looks like a midget because they go for the numbers. They would shrink down to 1.40m by some mathchanges but would grow because they go for the numbers again and resize their ava to the rl hight ... so they wouldnt look like midgets anymore compared to others and still got their real hight Take it easy, big hugs to you all... Lith Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
leliel Mirihi Posted April 12, 2011 Share Posted April 12, 2011 Lithelfys Leratia wrote: Why go for a measurment ? I dont trust the numbers some math told me about my shape in the edit... i do my ava size compared to other avas. For example... That's what people have been doing for years now and as a result everything in the grid is at a different scale. Judging your avatar's size by the things around you doesn't work when you have no idea what scale they were built to. You end up just guessing how tall you think that avatar wants to be, who knows what they based their size on, and what its size was based on, and what that thing's size was based on, etc. Here's a question for you. I have lots of furniture, some is made for 1.5m avatars, some for 2m avatars, some for 2.5m avatars, and some for giants. Which one is the right scale? By your logic which ever one I'm standing next to at the moment, which is ridiculous. Should I really have to adjust my size every where I go just to fit in with whatever scale that builder used? Your method, which admittedly most people use, completely breaks any sense of scale across the whole gird. With the eventual end game of making avatar height meaningless, I would argue that we're almost there. So for me, dont trust the numbers, trust what you see with your eyes compared to others. Except that I know a 1.5m prim is 1.5m. I have no idea if you want your avatar to be tall or short. Prims are objective, your perception of other people's height is subjective. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jo Yardley Posted April 12, 2011 Author Share Posted April 12, 2011 Well said leliel Mirihi, couldn't agree more. If we all had had a much more realistic and better avatar creator and basic avatars with realistic heights, SL would be a different world today. Houses, furntiture and bojects would be a much more realistic scale and not only would there be sims and a market for tinies, there would also be one for the giants. Right now everyone is sort of stuck in limbo. LUCKILY this has been changing a bit lately, at least it seems that way. When I first came to SL I was a dwarf amongst giants, now I see more and more avatars my size and more sims with the realistic size. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Penny Patton Posted April 12, 2011 Share Posted April 12, 2011 Lithelfys, I'm not saying anyone needs to shrink down. I'd like to see LL address the issue at it's source, correcting the height displayed in the appearance editor, providing new users with properly scaled and proportioned avatars as well as building with a better sense of scale for Linden maintained environments like the welcome areas. That's not the same as demanding everyone break out the yardsticks and start scaling themselves down. As for your question, tthere's a multitude of reasons to work by a set scale but I'll just repeat the most basic and practical reason which I stated earlier in this thread. If you are the average over-sized avatar in SL, you are paying about four times as much money for your land, per square metre, as someone who builds to scale. Larger structures also require substantially more prims, meaning you're using the amount of prims you have far less efficently, meaning less detail, less content, per square metre. That one reason has nothing to do with opinion, aesthetics, or point of view. It has nothing to do with being pouty, and the numbers are every bit as real as the numbers in your bank statement each month. Admittedly, much of that is the additional up-scaling one has to do to compensate for SL's terrible camera placement, however all else equal, the average SL avatar would still need to pay at least double what I pay in tier for the equivailent in-world experience. Whether you're talking a small, simple house, or a sprawling, full sim estate. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pussycat Catnap Posted April 16, 2011 Share Posted April 16, 2011 Penny Patton wrote: There are scripts that are pretty close to accurate. They use math fudges to take agent height and translate it into avatar height. Thwey're not entirely accurate, but they're about as close as someone would get standing in front of a measuring prim. I make a freebie which is one of those scripts. LSL, the scripting language of Second Life, has a function called Agent Height which returns a number that is the 'agent' that represents your avatar inworld. That agent is as tall as your eyes... - And that's the crux of the problem right there. How tall are you from your eyes to the top of your hair? All of the scripts you see basically make a guess on that. We each use a formula that recreates what we think is the 'average' settings for things like head size. Some of us then account for '80s hair' and others assume everyone is 'Kojak' with the rest in between. I've also got a height stick located at most of my venues and hangouts in SL, that anyone can stand next to. It has an added feature of marking off ticks for some common nationalities found in SL, as well as the world's shortest and tallest nationalities (not ethnic groups or I would have included pygmies, instead for shortest you get Peruvians if I recall right - average height of 4'8" for women). - Sticks like that, or using a prim, are the only good methods to use unless agent-height ever gets changed... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KleverKitsune Posted May 12, 2015 Share Posted May 12, 2015 Don't know if this is still an issue or not, but I'm using the Firestorm viewer, and it says my character is 6 feet in the creator/editor. When I use the prim method and measure that, it also comes up to 6 feet (or ~182cm). Since they match up does this mean that the issue has been resolved and the grid is accurate? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Coby Foden Posted May 12, 2015 Share Posted May 12, 2015 Linden Lab's Second Life viewer still shows the wrong height. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Drake1 Nightfire Posted May 12, 2015 Share Posted May 12, 2015 From 4 years ago?!? how hard did you search for this thread? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Coby Foden Posted May 12, 2015 Share Posted May 12, 2015 Klever has been very clever. :matte-motes-nerdy: Anyway, it was a valid question to this ancient thread. Because... KleverKitsune wrote: Don't know if this is still an issue or not, . . . :matte-motes-big-grin: :smileywink: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lewis Luminos Posted May 17, 2015 Share Posted May 17, 2015 The measurement in Firestorm is pretty accurate. The measurement in the official viewer is still off, after all these years. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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