Builders' Manual update: Common measurements

[ChinRey]

This is one for frequent updates but I have to start somewhere.

I've added a reference section to my blog, one with common measurements of various things. Measurements are usually in four different scales, RL, 133% (modern SL), 150% (average SL) and 200% (old style SL). More data is desperately needed so let me know if you have anything to add, let me know. (Paging @animats.)

Just to be clear: I'm not saying people should be forced to follow any rules for sizes in SL. But some want to do it and even for those who don't it's often a good diea to know the "rules" to be able to break them properly.

Edit: Forgot to include the link!

https://chinrey.blogspot.com/2019/04/common-measurements.html

Edited May 1, 2019 by ChinRey

[Ana Stubbs]

That looks useful, but I think it's worth cautioning people about the camera issues with low ceilings. The effect with a default camera can be... claustrophobic. I'm pretty good with enclosed spaces in RL but virtual ones make me feel very odd.

Edited May 2, 2019 by Ana Stubbs

[ChinRey]

11 hours ago, Ana Stubbs said:

That looks useful, but I think it's worth cautioning people about the camera issues with low ceilings. The effect with a default camera can be... claustrophobic. I'm pretty good with enclosed spaces in RL but virtual ones make me feel very odd.

As long as the proportions make sense and the object is modifiable, there's always the MBAGR.

That being said, I'm not sure if it's really possible to have sensible proportions in SL. In addition to the foreshortening and maneuvring issues caused by the awkward default camera postion, there's also the built in "fisheye lense" exaggerated horizontal perspective.

Take a look at this picture:

It's two identical copies of a bungalow I'm working on at the moment and the one to the left is stretched out to about 110% of the width of the one in the center. It's like looking through the wrong end of a telescope, except it's only horizontal, not vertical. In SL we are forced to watch our concave hulls through convex lenses.

I'm not sure why LL made it this way. I was once told it was to create an illusion of a wider field of view but that doesn't make sense since it does exactly the opposite.

I think this is one of the worst visual flaws in SL. It's not quite as bad as dodgy LoD models, slideshow level frame rate, half rendered mesh avatars and jellydolls, but close. And there doesn't seem to be anything we can do about it. You can reduce the distortion with the Ctrl-0 zoom function but you need to zoom in three or four steps to get anything resembling realistic perspective. That causes all sorts of other problems of course and the perspective is still noticeably uneven across the screen.

Here's how the bungalow looks with the persepctive corrected as much as possible with Ctrl-0 zoom.

[Structura Finesmith]

I'm so glad I'm not the only one suffering with the "fisheye" problem...

[Penny Patton]

I feel like the only reason there are people making content so over-sized is because they don't put any thought into scale at all, and SL's built in tools were developed missing basic features like scale guides, so they're unlikely try and codify their lack of scale into any set percentage over SL's actual built in measurements.

As for low ceilings, I highly recommend modifying your camera position. When SL was originally developed, 3D gaming was still in its early days and camera placement and controls for 3D gaming was something developers were still struggling with. The game industry eventually figured it out, but SL is still stuck with its bad old default camera settings and LL's plans to change that have apparently gone AWOL. Luckily, with some pretty simple tweaks you can greatly reduce the "low ceilings" problem while making SL feel much more immersive, but I'd still suggest anyone building (to scale or not) to compromise just a bit to give the camera some breathing room.

[Profaitchikenz Haiku]

Unless you always roam in mouselook you are going to have to add an extra 1 to 2  metres to the length and breadth of a building otherwise it just becomes tedious moving around and constantly adjusting the camera to either drag it back out of the walls or else reset it from where the collision bashed it to. I came to SL from the train simulator world where everything was to perfect scale, but I'll trade the true-scale for the social side of SL without a tear.

And then there's the problem that not all avatars conform to the expected humanoid height (Get 'em out by Friday ?)

I got rapped on the knuckles for the first working train I made here in SL, a super-tall (2.4metre) visitor sat on the seats but then when they tried to stand up to leave at the next station they couldn't get through the doorway to get off and were dragged hither and thither until I de-rezzed the railcar. My first reaction was to put a loading-gauge at the stations and refuse entry to any body.thing that clobbered it.

[Penny Patton]

7 hours ago, Profaitchikenz Haiku said:

Unless you always roam in mouselook you are going to have to add an extra 1 to 2  metres to the length and breadth of a building otherwise it just becomes tedious moving around and constantly adjusting the camera ...

Once you make the adjustments I linked to once you don't need to make them again, unless you do a completely fresh install or switch to another viewer. LL had plans to address this problem two years ago with a new camera interface and some improved presets for people to choose from easily, but now no one I've spoken with at LL seems to know what is going on with that.

7 hours ago, Profaitchikenz Haiku said:

And then there's the problem that not all avatars conform to the expected humanoid height (Get 'em out by Friday ?)

This wouldn't be a problem if extremely over-sized avatars were deliberate outliers. The problem is that the average SL user has no clue how big their avatar is and so the "average height" varies greatly from community to community, making it impossible to create an environment in consistent scale with its visitors. However, it is very possible to create an acceptable illusion of scale it you keep ceilings no lower than 3-4 metres, and rooms no smaller than 10x10m. Doomed Ship, New California, and a host of other SL sims do this and over-sized visitors have no trouble getting around in them, provided they make the previously suggested camera adjustments. There's also building tricks you can apply such as making the ceiling phantom with an invisible bounding box slightly higher, phantom walls above doorways allowing taller avatars to pass through, and experience-based invisible teleporters that only the tallest avatars will bump into, giving them a nearly seamless transition past low-ceiling obstacles. For your train example, you could set it up so it unsits riders near the train door, where those over a certain height would bump a teleporter that would place them outside the train car.

 Really, though, I wish LL would development an understanding on why basic design principles are important. They're really their own worst enemy when it comes to making SL more successful in terms of user numbers and retention.

[Profaitchikenz Haiku]

2 hours ago, Penny Patton said:

Once you make the adjustments I linked to once you don't need to make them again

I'll try your suggestion, I would like to be able to get close to scale again, if only to make buildings that can be used for snapshots without the avatar's head barely reaching the dado rail

[ChinRey]

On 5/12/2019 at 9:39 AM, Profaitchikenz Haiku said:

I'll try your suggestion, I would like to be able to get close to scale again, if only to make buildings that can be used for snapshots without the avatar's head barely reaching the dado rail

That reminds me why I rejoined SL in 2013. Some of my friends needed some simple pictures of people in various scenes and complained how hard that was to find. Essentilly what they wanted was a more practical and flexible DAZ. I suggested they could do it in Second Life but they told me that wasn't possible. So I created an account here just to prove them wrong. Fortunately I never told them about it, so I didn't have to admit my mistake.

The sad thing is that in a sense I should have been right. Second Life is in almost every way incredibly suitable as an easy to use and flexible tool for creating all kind of photo and video illustrations. But unfortunately it's all but ruined by the skewed perspective and lack of proportions.

Edited May 13, 2019 by ChinRey

[Kyrah Abattoir]

I wish there was a good way to translate Valve's scaling primer to SL.

You can find their page about it here: https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Dimensions

It's especially interesting when it comes to doors and ceilings as they make some "accomodations" to make things look right when playing in first person view.

Oh and the fact that people in source games are typically 1.37m for 2.05m doors and 2.44m ceilings.

Edited May 14, 2019 by Kyrah Abattoir