Smaller Doors Anyone Can Fit Through

[Penny Patton]

Or How to Enjoy the Benefits of Building to Scale Without Making it Impossible for Others to Explore Your Creation!

A lot of people tell me that they want to scale their builds down, but feel that if they do larger avatars will not be able to fit through doors in their sims. This is a very valid concern, but one with several very simple solutions. Before we get into said solutions, first remember that you can only resize a building that is either modifiable or includes a resize script (most no-mod houses do not, at the time of this writing, include a resize script). So your safest bet is to avoid buying no-mod.

 If you build mesh houses/buildings yourself I'll say right away that the best solution is to leave the wall over the door phantom. Bam! Done! You've made a building that is more accessible to all sorts of SL users and a bit easier to rescale to better suite for your customers purposes.

 For those of you who have purchased your buildings and need solutions to the small door problem, read on!

The Physics Solution
Here is a mesh house I've shrunk down to about 1=1 scale. For reference, my avatar is 6'1" (it's my crazy tall platform shoes) and the door frame is about a foot and a half or two feet taller.

So how is an 8-9' tall avatar going to fit inside that? EASILY!

 First you need to find out how the physics for your structure are done. Many mesh buildings use a shell of some sort, separate from the mesh model. Not all structures do this.

 If your building has no separate physics box, a quick solution is to see if the wall over the door is a separate mesh item you can simply set phantom. Even if it's connected to the wall on either side of the door you can set it all to phantom and put two invisible prims in its place.

 If the building is a single structure that can't be separated you may have to set the whole thing phantom and build the physics with prims, I'll explain that a bit more later.

In the meantime, let's reveal the physics prims for this house!

The prim physics boxes are blue! Notice how there's no prim covering the wall above the door! That wall is completely phantom so avatars of any size can fit. All of the interior doors for the house are the same! Leave that space blank and you have doors anyone can squeeze through.

 So what if your structure doesn't use prims for the physics? Set the building phantom and build a physics shell out of prims like I did for this house! If you also set the house itself to "no-physics" you can often reduce it's land impact considerably! The root object of a linkset must have physics so you may have to link the house to a prim first, set the whole structure to "no-physics" then set the prim itself to "convex hull" for minimum land impact.

 Remember to set the physics prims to "convex hull" to reduce their own land impact. After you've done all this you can often link the no-physics house to the convex hull prim shell for even more of a land impact reduction. The entire house in this example is 21 land impact.

Teleporter Solution 1
 Another solution to the small doors problem is to place a teleporter above the door! Just rez a prim above the door frame, where the physics for the wall over the door begins, like so.

And one for the opposite side as well.

Then you simply make the prims invisible and put a teleporter script inside each.

 If you want this to be completely seamless you'll need an Experience Key. This way when an avatar collides with the prim they will automatically be teleported to the other side of the door frame. They may not even notice the teleport.

 If you do not have access to an Experience, you can put a script inside the prim which informs the avatar colliding that they need to click above the door to "duck". Setting the prim to "sit when touched" and an old fashioned sit teleporter script will then be enough to achieve the effect.

 Success! A door anyone can pass through!

Teleporter Solution 2
 There is an alternate way to use teleporters to create doors anyone can pass through. That is to make the entire doorway itself a teleporter!

 I like to put building interiors into skyboxes (reduces lag, increases framerates, and gives me more freedom in building) and the entrances/exits for these skyboxes are teleporters disguised as doors.

 You can script your own or use a an existing door teleporter like Curio Obscura's "Anywhere Door".

 The "Anywhere Door" is a sit teleporter. You click the door to open, then click the open doorway to be teleported to the door's destination.

 My own sims now use an Experience based teleporter for a more seamless experience. You click on the door to open it and then simply walk into the open doorway to be teleported.

ETA: Here's a thread about scripting the doors themselves. (I'll maybe look around to see if there's a good thread on scripting teleporters unless someone wants to throw one at me!)

 And there you have it! Three solutions to the problem of doors being too small for giant sized avatars! I hope these examples help you out in your own sim building adventures, if you have any questions, leave them in the comments below!

Edited January 30, 2018 by Penny Patton
Link to door scripting thread.

[ChinRey]

25 minutes ago, Penny Patton said:

Most mesh buildings are, themselves, phantom, and the physics boxes for them are created with prims.

I really hope and I do believe you're wrong there, at least if you're talking about commercial builds. Using prim physics for a mesh house is a clumsy emergency solution some builders fall back on if they've messed up the physics, not something serious mesh makers do on a regular basis.

It's easy to make a mesh house that works with oversized avatars anyway, you simply make the physical doorway a little bit taller than the visual one.

 

[Chic Aeon]

7 minutes ago, ChinRey said:

I really hope and I do believe you're wrong there, at least if you're talking about commercial builds. Using prim physics for a mesh house is a clumsy emergency solution some builders fall back on if they've messed up the physics, not something serious mesh makers do on a regular basis.

It's easy to make a mesh house that works with oversized avatars anyway, you simply make the physical doorway a little bit taller than the visual one.

 

THANK YOU!

OMG the things people still believe! 

You saved me a lot of typing LOL.  

[Penny Patton]

1 hour ago, ChinRey said:

I really hope and I do believe you're wrong there, at least if you're talking about commercial builds. Using prim physics for a mesh house is a clumsy emergency solution some builders fall back on if they've messed up the physics, not something serious mesh makers do on a regular basis.

It's easy to make a mesh house that works with oversized avatars anyway, you simply make the physical doorway a little bit taller than the visual one.

 

You may be correct. Some houses have a separate mesh shell for physics, some use the physics of the items in the house itself. I've seen all kinds but the advice here works for all of them, even as a last resort if there are no better ways to achieve the same effect present.  (I have found that some structures which do use the physics of the mesh items they're constructed from benefit from a substantial Land Impact reduction if you use a prim shell instead.)

Thank you, tho, you're right about mesh creators leaving the wall above the door phantom. I've edited the post to lead with your suggestion to those making the mesh buildings themselves. I should have lead with that to begin with. The rest of the post stands as solutions to people who are not building their own mesh from scratch and need solutions to what they have to work with right now.

Edited January 30, 2018 by Penny Patton

[Anna Nova]

I prefer the "You want to be a giant in my house?  Ha Ha!" solution.  But then I only build for me, not for sale.

Edited January 31, 2018 by anna2358
typo

[ChinRey]

5 hours ago, anna2358 said:

I prefer the "You want to be a giant in my house?  Ha Ha!" solution.

Even better: make the doorway lower on the inside than on the outside so big avatars can walk in but not get out again.

I did that by accident on my Skaidi earth hut. Fortunately I happened to show it to one of my taller friends so I noticed and fixed it before I listed it for sale. But it was quite entertaining to see him struggle to get out of a doorway he had no problems walking in through.

[IvanBenjammin]

FYI, and sorry to be off-topic: The building in your second set of images (Teleporter Solution 1) is a rip from Fallout 4.

[Codex Alpha]

I can't stand this kind of thing. I want to spend my time designing and optimizing for a standard size, and thats what I do. All my builds will be designed for the default SL Avatar size, give or take a foot or so, but at some point as creators we have to put our foot down and decide who we are designing for.

Go ahead and be a minotaur. Just don't expect the human sized bed will fit you.

Especially when it comes to avatar sitting positions, animations or even designs where you want a certain fluid look sitting in a vehicle cockpit or what have you.

At least when designing for the Sims, there is only one scale to be concerned with.

Of course on some items, adding modify works, but on complex builds like a house, everything from windows to even the scale of stairs will get all wonky on resize.

[ChinRey]

11 hours ago, entity0x said:

I can't stand this kind of thing. I want to spend my time designing and optimizing for a standard size, and thats what I do.

I'm going for the "yes pelase, both" solution.

I returned to houses recently and this time I'm doing them with Real Life proportions and then I scale each building to two different sizes, "realistic" (actually about 105%) and "modern SL" (slightly less than 150%). If I ever bother to offer any of my recent builds for sale, they will come with a  resizer script so people can scale them to whatever size they like.

[iamyourneighbour]

Reminds me of Sims with "You must be this short to enter" script lol

[Maitimo]

On 1/30/2018 at 3:46 PM, Penny Patton said:

You can script your own or use a an existing door teleporter like Curio Obscura's "Anywhere Door".

I did something similar with my last skybox. I wanted a garden, but the skybox had no entrance so I built the garden on the roof and placed a fake door with a teleport script inside the skybox. One click to teleport.

[animats]

On 4/7/2018 at 2:01 AM, ChinRey said:

I'm going for the "yes pelase, both" solution.

I returned to houses recently and this time I'm doing them with Real Life proportions and then I scale each building to two different sizes, "realistic" (actually about 105%) and "modern SL" (slightly less than 150%). If I ever bother to offer any of my recent builds for sale, they will come with a  resizer script so people can scale them to whatever size they like.

Nice. I visited a sim of demo houses recently. One of them had standard height doors (7 ft). It felt kind of cramped, but the avatar worked fine and the camera stayed below the ceilings. If you have low ceilings, their physics model matters for camera control purposes.

[ChinRey]

39 minutes ago, animats said:

Nice. I visited a sim of demo houses recently. One of them had standard height doors (7 ft). It felt kind of cramped, but the avatar worked fine and the camera stayed below the ceilings. If you have low ceilings, their physics model matters for camera control purposes.

Yes, with the right physics, the camera will try to adjust to the ceiling but true-to-scale ceiling height will always feel a bit cramped with the camera above the avatar.

I believe if we want a virtual world that is more immersive (the world itself that is, not the activities you take part in in it), first person POW is the essentail factor and everything else is trivial by comparasion. Except possibly walking speed but a switch to 1st person POW kind'a mandates that.

I haven't uploaded those flexi scale houses to SL btw and I probably never will since it seems a bit pointless.

[animats]

Field of view is a problem with first person POV, which is why camera-behind-the-avatar is so popular in games. VR headsets sort of solve that problem, but then you have all the problems of VR headsets.

The solution to the field of view problem.

Samsung, ASUS, and Dell all make 49 inch wide curved displays now. Prices are still around $1000 but are dropping.

[Aquila Kytori]

Thought of this thread when I came across these two videos today :

 

 

 

[Thecla]

I'm "appropriately scaled" and have no trouble with doorways. What I do have a problem with is my camera. I have been in some absolutely gorgeous builds, such as those by MariedePolignac, that are unfortunately maddening to navigate with your camera slicing through the walls of small "realistically sized" rooms. Of course since she focuses on historically accurate builds from a period when rooms WERE generally smaller, it is hard to avoid that. It's also why warehouses are so popular as residences in SL, lol.

Just the nature of the beast. If we had a more usable "mouselook" experience in SL, things might be different.

[ChinRey]

3 hours ago, Thecla said:

Just the nature of the beast. If we had a more usable "mouselook" experience in SL, things might be different.

Oh yes! If I was allowed to change only one thing in Second Life, it would be to add a first person view option without all the other UI changes we get with mouselook. No other improvement would be even nearly as important to me as that.

All is not lost though. It's fairly easy to adjust your camera position closer away from the birdseye view and clsoer to your avatar. Penny Patton made a really good tutorial how to do it: https://pennycow.blogspot.com/2012/01/improving-sl-camera-short-version.html

My own settings are a bit different from Penny's and closer to Jo Yardley's: https://joyardley.wordpress.com/2012/04/14/camera-placement-in-second-life/

[Thecla]

Oh yes I'm well familiar with changing camera settings, but the fact of the matter is that we don't experience real world buildings from cameras above and behind our heads, so any "real world proportioned" room is going to feel smaller.

Also, I like to have my camera where I can see my ass just in case someone sneaks up on it.

[Kyrah Abattoir]

I've been using one of Penny's camera settings for years, to the point where going back to the default feels like a weird, alienating experience.

A much flatter line of sight, closer to my avatar is way nicer to experience SL.