Head size

[MoiraKathleen]

5 hours ago, Rhonda Huntress said:

There are many more proportion charts available.  This is just the one I grabbed because it has a matching male version and I use these boards in world for making shapes.

Here's one that is a bit more contemporary and probably closer to what I make.

I should actually try one of these sometime, and see if I'm off scale or not.  Hopefully if I am, it's just a little bit where I could fudge and say close enough  

I try not to get too obsessed with shapes but then I'll spend a whole evening doing nothing except messing with the shape (and usually staying with what I started the evening out with).

[Alyona Su]

[Ceka Cianci]

From what I remember,your head size is kind of the starting point for everything else..

In other words..The size of your shoulders depends on the size of your head and not the other way around..then it is head sizes from your starting point that determine the proportions of everything else..

So many of heads for this thing and so many heads for that thing,but all using the starting head size for measurements.

[saskia1172003]

On 5/8/2019 at 11:27 PM, cicelydawn said:

I have always struggled with head size because I have a relatively full figure for SL and so what looks proportional sometimes seems huge especially when, as has been noted, a lot of heads appear to be on the small side.

Anyway, a wrinkle about head size not mentioned here is that many people camming in to look up your nostrils are using alt-zoom. It's the SL equivalent of walking up close to someone with a wide-angle lens, and in that sense the effect is quite realistic: the center is hugely distorted. Using the ctrl-0 zoom (or phototools view angle setting) is more akin to a digital zoom, which simulates a longer focal length by cropping the original view. This is more "accurate,"  but if people are viewing and setting their own shapes through an inherently distorted lens, who's to say what's correct, I guess.  If you already knew this and thought "Everybody already knew this!" ... I think you'd be surprised. If you didn't know this and think it can't possibly be true, try it and see. 

Yea It is possible for sure, we are the only rulers on our body pixeled shape but sometimes it gets harder to get by!

When the viewer is not the main one, the body can be affected for real so that's why proportions help us. But we are also different from our ethnicity so it is valuable.

 

[Scylla Rhiadra]

20 hours ago, Ceka Cianci said:

From what I remember,your head size is kind of the starting point for everything else..

In other words..The size of your shoulders depends on the size of your head and not the other way around..then it is head sizes from your starting point that determine the proportions of everything else..

So many of heads for this thing and so many heads for that thing,but all using the starting head size for measurements.

I think the way that I started the process was to decide from the outset how tall I wanted to be (1.8m I think), divide that by 7.5 (for seven and a half head-heights), and use the resulting number to determine my head size. Then I went on to calculate everything else based on that . . . making the necessary adjustments as I went along.

[Ceka Cianci]

10 hours ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

I think the way that I started the process was to decide from the outset how tall I wanted to be (1.8m I think), divide that by 7.5 (for seven and a half head-heights), and use the resulting number to determine my head size. Then I went on to calculate everything else based on that . . . making the necessary adjustments as I went along.

So you basically got your head size figured out that you wanted, and then based the proportions on that right?

That's pretty much how I do it as well..figure out what height I want to be, then get my head size..Then build my proportions from that..

[Scylla Rhiadra]

26 minutes ago, Ceka Cianci said:

So you basically got your head size figured out that you wanted, and then based the proportions on that right?

That's pretty much how I do it as well..figure out what height I want to be, then get my head size..Then build my proportions from that..

Yep! Pretty much exactly the same process!

[DeepBlueJoy]

On 5/8/2019 at 6:42 PM, Rhonda Huntress said:

You are absolutely right.
Rules are made to be broken   However you need to know what the rules are and how to break them properly.  Like I said, start with the norm and then tweak from there.

My point was, it is all about ratios and not about an arbitrary number on a slider.  At 6' 1"  (the height of the board) my head size is not going to be the same an a similarly proportioned shape at 5" 4" for example.  There is no static one size fits all value.

I didn't mean it as a criticism, so much as an observation.  The guide body (the drawn one), as dated as it is, is a relatively good starting point to make a decently proportioned avi.  It's not a rule, but anyone starting with it would do adequately.  As several of us have said, there are a number of guides out there... and they are better to use than just winging it if you don't know, which, evidently (just from looking around SL) a lot of people do not. All the best.

[Syo Emerald]

You don't look like the kind of person I would take advice from in terms of editing my shape...especially the head.

[Branduff Bisnovat]

The vast majority of people don't have a background in figure drawing, and even the hobbyists tend to confuse comic book proportions with human scale, and then of course exaggerate them further.  That's why your average avatar is taller than 2m, but wears child-sized shoes.

On 5/8/2019 at 7:23 PM, moirakathleen said:

What struck me about the chart you posted was seeing the high heels on the woman model.  The hair style also suggests some bygone era...

I'm pretty sure that specific image is by Jack Hamm, and was originally published in one of his books around the mid 20th century.  He had a million "How to Draw" books, if he was even an actual person.  I always assumed he was the Betty Crocker of comic book illustration.