Mesh scale for buildings

[PaxBrewer]

Hey everyone,

I'm kinda new to creating content for SL and worked on a house recently. However, when I imported a few test meshes to work out the dimensions I noticed that the scale seemed a bit off. I made my avatar exactly 2m for testing purposes and imported a 2x2x2m cube from Blender. For some odd reason that cube was smaller than my avatar, more like 1.7x1.7x1.7m. Am I missing out on some important settings here?

[Gordon Nadezda]

My avatar is 2.12m tall. I created a test cube in Blender, set the z dimension to 2.12m, and imported it into SL. It was exactly the same height as my avatar. When you uploaded your test model into SL, did you use the Scale option ( under the Upload Options tab) to reduce it before uploading? 

[ChinRey]

6 hours ago, PaxBrewer said:

Hey everyone,

I'm kinda new to creating content for SL and worked on a house recently. However, when I imported a few test meshes to work out the dimensions I noticed that the scale seemed a bit off. I made my avatar exactly 2m for testing purposes and imported a 2x2x2m cube from Blender. For some odd reason that cube was smaller than my avatar, more like 1.7x1.7x1.7m. Am I missing out on some important settings here?

The avatar size is the one that is wrong. This is an old bug that has never been fixed and probably never will be.

[Da5id Weatherwax]

As @ChinRey said. "Avatar height" is broken in more ways than it's possible to count. "Agent height" - what you see when editing your shape, calculated from the values of your shape and also the value for your "height" that is accessible by scripts, underestimates your actual "measured by a prim" height by a variable amount AND fails to take into account any subsequent "adjustments" caused by animations, hover height, shoe-bases etc..

Prim scale is SL's "real scale" - in that it is consistent for everything else apart from avatars on the grid. a 1x1x50 prim covers a 1x1 square of ground and if you stand on top of it your z coordinate will be 50m higher than when you were standing next to it. Upload a 1x1x1 cube mesh from blender, rez a 1x1x1 cube prim beside it, they will be the same size. To make items intended to be unrigged attachments or props close to the scale of most avatars - even the ones where folks have put in effort to make them "proportional" - you will need to scale them up inworld by approximately a factor of 1.2x.

Just make them at their "RL dimensions" in blender and upload them (remember to make sure you've applied any object-level scale transform in blender before exporting them to the .dae file) - you'll find that when you measure them with a prim they will be exactly the size you thought they would be. You can then apply the 1.2x scale inworld if you find you need to in order to make them a better size for avatar interaction.

[Chic Aeon]

If anyone besides you is going to be using your house --- customers, friends, alts etc then it is VERY IMPORTANT that you test with various heights of avatars and best if you make your building mod if you are going to sell it.  Avatars come in all shapes and sizes,   I try to aim for the six foot crowd also but than have my testing alt (big) make sure it will work for them and THEN make it mod so folks can enlarge or shrink as needed.   

 

 

[Kyrah Abattoir]

You can have fairly realistic door and window heights, it is a good idea to simply not have collisions on the top of doorframes.

But keep in mind that ceilings need to have some breathing room for camera movement, it doesn't need to be extreme, but it is something to keep in mind.

[arabellajones]

The nominal scale in Second Life is often nothing like the avatar scale, but you can do some re-scaling in-world after import. It can get complicated. The Import process does have a scale factor. but that just seems to push up import costs. It can be useful to tweak rigged mesh a few per cent, but better not to need it.

You need to have Modify permissions on a mesh somebody else provides, but sometimes you have non-modify from a script or texture, while the mesh can be re-scaled.