Female avis are getting smaller and smaller? 0.0

[Ayashe Ninetails]

7 hours ago, Nightingalia said:

I remember a few years back the trend was that everyone was a little too big and too tall. However with Legacy becoming popular amongst other bodies that aren't Maitreya/ Belleza/ Slink, I've noticed that 9/10 girls I see are super tiny! 

I very rarely notice my height unless I find myself standing in a crowd. Everyone is super tiny to me and it's always been that way, so I'm probably not a good judge of this sort of thing. Apparently, I'm 6.95 feet/2.12 meters with my height slider near maxed in my current shape (an orc). Pretty sure most of my avatars are within that range, but I don't often run around as human. I make use of a lot of lower body mods (specialty legs/feet and mermaid tails, primarily) and favor taller fantasy creatures and monsters, so I tend to keep myself really tall by default. I guess I'm just used to it by now. I've tried making shorter shapes for my human avies, but I'm never happy with the results. So, they're tall, too.

If girls are getting shorter, I wouldn't even notice. Shorties all of em!

Plot twist - I'm a shortie in RL.

[Bree Giffen]

I have noticed some very small avatars and I always thought it was some kind of kemono body type thing. I don’t click on people to see what they are wearing so I am just guessing. I don’t mind all the new body shapes people are using these days. It’s much better than those pony rider shapes we had awhile ago.

[Eddy Vortex]

9 hours ago, ValKalAstra said:

Height in SL is just plain a mess. For example, there were times when I had scaled up my avatar to fit a backdrop made for giants -  and Firestorm went "aye lass, you're now 5cm smaller".

So personally I'll just chalk it up to SL jank and adjust my avatar to what feels natural to me. It sometimes leads to odd moments with furniture for giants or the occasional "everything below 3m is bait" people but overall works well.

My main avatar was made to resemble a 6'2", 140 lbs man and the height tool I had told me that he's 7'5".  I once tried to scale him to RL proportions with the rezzed prim method only to have him looking like a victim of a falling piano accident. I've long learned to disregard what height measuring tools say and go with what feels most natural to me.

I've also noticed the average SL height has shrunk in recent years, even with men. The tallest ones only reached up to Greg's chin. Most modern furniture I've noticed has been scaled to fit the new average accordingly.  Furniture shopping is difficult for this poor guy.

 

9 hours ago, Space Zehetbauer said:

The sunsets are spectacular from up here.  🙂

Taller avatars can come in handy for weather reporting.  "Hey Greg, how's the weather up there?"

Edited July 16, 2022 by Eddy Vortex

[cariboustag]

6 hours ago, Maitimo said:

ended up looking so distorted and out of proportion I scrapped the entire idea.

This encapsulates my current problem with adjusting shapes for Jake. I'm around 6 and a half foot tall height to 7 feet according to the shape window, and I'd love to be slightly shorter, but the instant I go below 60 or 70 on the slider I might as well just re-do the whole shape. And I do (sometimes) but things still feel wonky.

At the end of the day I guess I'm just too lazy to puzzle out proportion properly.

Edited July 17, 2022 by cariboustag

[Jackson Redstar]

"Height" in SL is in a word, stupid. This is a digital world. the only thing that matters in proportions. We could be an equivliant 15 feet tall or 2 feet tall and long as everything is properly scaled around us - it would not matter. And honestly this whole 'well Im 5 feet in RL so I MUST be that in SLto be "real" is a bit silly too because very little to nothing else on the female avi represents what is "real" in RL. Yes one can be too tall or too short in SL, but an average of '6 or 7 feet" scales in fine with most of the builds and other objects  in SL

[Dafadilia Wayfarer]

What baffles me is my avi is considered petite in sl at 5'11. All of my accounts are elves in sl so I made them taller. Most other avis are taller than me still set to this height. I've also been asked if I'm a child avatar...so yep. Height and proportion in sl is something that has always been up for interpretation.

In rl I'm 4'11, and very petite. I've been told even my voice sounds petite. No idea since I'm deaf and can't hear my voice. So in sl, I tried being a bit taller and turned out to still be shorter than most others. 🤣

[Krystina Ferraris]

I’m 5’10 in RL and when I made Krys to be 5’10 in SL people were saying how cute and small I looked...  ok 🙄 also any furniture looked way oversized for me, I couldn’t even reach the cooker or the table LOL 😂 

So I scaled her up appropriately to fit in. I see smaller avatars around now but hey, as long as they’re happy and fit in then that’s all that matters.

[Ceka Cianci]

I just know being smaller, I have sooo much more room for activities now..

[Psyche Starling]

I've noticed a lot of the shapes you buy for heads, the body shape that comes with it is very short. I always change it back. I think I'm about 6 feet tall in SL, which would be notable as a woman in RL, but in SL I find that it nicely approximates my RL height of 5'6", in that I'm taller than a lot of women but not all, and shorter than most men. So it feels right walking around, even if the numbers don't make sense.

[Lindal Kidd]

5 hours ago, Rowan Amore said:

Did a little comparison of the SL and Firestorm viewers with height.  I have no idea about alchemy but it seems the Firestorm viewer is closer to what is the actual height of your avatar.  

 

That is a really nice bit of testing, Rowan. I'd heard for years about the whole "Appearance window doesn't measure your height correctly" thing, and was therefore a little puzzled when my viewer (Firestorm) and my measuring prim reported the same result. I had not thought to check with other viewers, thanks!

[Nightingalia]

6 hours ago, Maitimo said:

 

Don't know how anyone can get sigificantly below 5ft with Maitreya though - I tried to make a small (but not Petite) fairy avatar and only managed to get down to around 4ft 11, and even then, it ended up looking so distorted and out of proportion I scrapped the entire idea.

Yep! That is exactly my problem. There's not a lot more to go smaller with Maitreya if you want to keep your proportions 😂

[Sorina Garrigus]

One of my alt is using an LL issued body at the moment ... she feels the height of a 12 year old to me or I feel like Frankensteins Monster. For ages 6 foot tall in SL was pretty short. why I dunno. 

[Lucia Nightfire]

8 hours ago, Rowan Amore said:

Did a little comparison of the SL and Firestorm viewers with height.  I have no idea about alchemy but it seems the Firestorm viewer is closer to what is the actual height of your avatar.  

 

Firestorm is adding 20 centimeters to your height to match your hit box's height or bounding box while standing.

LL's viewer does not.

Neither viewer's Appearance editor correctly tracks the impact rigged mesh has, which lately seems to shrink a user's height to a degree on average.

[skepwith]

Today I went and looked at a camper styled Linden home. I'm 173 cm (5'8") according to Firestorm and the box I made to measure.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

17 minutes ago, skepwith said:

Today I went and looked at a camper styled Linden home. I'm 173 cm (5'8") according to Firestorm and the box I made to measure.

Yeah. This is one of the reasons I'm not especially interested in a Linden Home. I'm taller than you -- 181 cms (measured by prim) -- but some of door handles are at boob height for me.

The place where I do rent an apartment, Voroznia, is slightly oversized, but not nearly so dramatically.

[Nightingalia]

Idk how reliable this random height scale I got off MP is, but if it's accurate you guys are right- turns out I'm not 1.57, but 1.75!! (Though my wig does give me quite a bit of height)

I guess this explains why I seem tall!

 

[skepwith]

1 hour ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Yeah. This is one of the reasons I'm not especially interested in a Linden Home. I'm taller than you -- 181 cms (measured by prim) -- but some of door handles are at boob height for me.

The place where I do rent an apartment, Voroznia, is slightly oversized, but not nearly so dramatically.

I can be pretty forgiving when it comes to houses since they really can have crazy high ceilings but a camping trailer that much larger than me makes me feel like I should be asking in a squeaky voice if Susie can come out and play. Either that, or that thing is an absolute nightmare to tow.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

7 minutes ago, skepwith said:

I can be pretty forgiving when it comes to houses since they really can have crazy high ceilings but a camping trailer that much larger than me makes me feel like I should be asking in a squeaky voice if Susie can come out and play. Either that, or that thing is an absolute nightmare to tow.

Fair. But I don't want to look like this when I'm peering out the window.

[Akane Nacht]

I haven't changed my avatar's height since day 1 (excepting when I am non-human). 1.64m which is by pure coincidence my RL height. Maybe it's the places I go but I usually feel pretty short, I only reach boob level of most female avies I see. It gets scary in mouselook.

[Coffee Pancake]

189 in platform heels (not counting ears) by rezzing a cube. 

I'm not short. I'm the wrong scale !

If I slam the sliders and go as big as I can, and bump up a lot of things to try and keep proportions something similar ... I can make 220 cm .. in heels.

 

Who are these houses even for?!!

 

 

[Quistess Alpha]

16 minutes ago, Coffee Pancake said:

Who are these houses even for?!!

The camera lakitus several meters above everyone's heads of course .

[Maitimo]

It is indeed because of the camera. If the house or trailer was to-scale, the only way to move around inside it would be in Mouselook. Yes you can adjust it, but most SL users do not know how. and even then, regardless of how you adjust it, you either need rooms that are super-high, or rooms that are super-wide, because in a to-scale size room your camera would need to be so close to you that the back of your head would fill your entire screen.

[Phil Deakins]

It is a combination of 2 things that causes all of this. A couple of people have already pointed out this first one - the default camera position, which does require large rooms so that we can move around in them satisfactorily. That means larger furniture, of course, which in turn means larger avatars. The other reason is that there have always been people who want RL avatar heights. Those two never did, and never will, live happily together in SL, and it's the desire for RL sizes that causes the problems.

This discussion has been repeated for many years. For one of the repetitions, I actually made an RL sized room (12'x12') with an RL sized bed and drawers in it, and found it impossible to move around in anywhere near satisfactorily, because the camera doesn't behave like eyes. Even a change to the camera position didn't work, again because the camera isn't a pair of moving eyes in a moving head. It has a fixed view that will never work in typical RL sized rooms. It's ok in palaces and large mansions, but not in typical RL sized houses.

I used to be one the largest furniture sellers in SL and none of my stuff was sized for RL height avatars. It was all sized realistically for SL. The last bed that I made was different to the rest, though, in that it's width and length could be adjusted in the menus. It could be adjusted to suit the smallest single child avatar right up to multiple giant avatars.

There are no signs of this problem ever going away so, if furniture and house makers would do the same with their products as I did with that last bed, it would actually solve the problem. I think that a creator, who sold nothing but menu-driven size-adjustable stuff, would do very well indeed. It would need to be menu-driven rather than just the mod perm because many users wouldn't be able to adjust everything in the Edit box - especially textures - and could easily make a mess of it that they can't get out of. I didn't get into mesh, and there may be difficulties in doing that with mesh items, but I don't know.

 

Edited July 17, 2022 by Phil Deakins

[ChinRey]

22 hours ago, Ceka Cianci said:

In a 3d world, is smaller really a bad thing? I remember PussyCat used to talk about her avatar being smaller and the advantages of having more room..

She's right of course, if you scale everything up in a virtual world, the only thing you get is less space. But there are several other factors that complicates things.

One is of course that SL is filled with out of proportion content that can't be easily replaced.

The exaggerated perspective distorts the size of objects depending on their distance from the camera.

The remote top-down "birdseye view" camera position makes it hard to navigate in confined spaces, such as inside a RL sized house and combined with the distorted perspective also shortens everything down on the ground.

Second Life was made for old fasihioned monitors with 5:4 proportions. On modern 4:3, 16:9 or 16:10 monitors everything is stretched horizontally, more so the further you get from the center of the screen.

Walking speed is about twice as fast as the average RL speed, making it difficult to navigate in relatively narrow "RL size" spaces.

If we want realistic sizes and proportions in SL, all of these factors will have to be adressed, not just one or two of them, and I can't see that happening anytime soon.

[Marianne Little]

It is like this or worse height difference in SL. She has normal heels, while in SL girls can have enormous plateau heels and not reach a man's nipple.

Edit: I think this is men's dream in RL. It must be, or else, would they not be shorter in SL?

Edited July 17, 2022 by Marianne Little