A Matter of Scale - How scale affects content creation and land ownership in Second Life.

[Dresden Ceriano]

YAY!!!

...Dres

[Penny Patton]

I wrote a somewhat related article expanding on my observations about camera placement in Second Life.

"A Matter of Perspective"

I also posted this same article here in the forums, under "Second Life Viewer" because while it affects content creation, it's really more of a viewer issue. I only touch on the scale issues I went into detail with in this article as it's more about how why "over the shoulder" has become the industry standard for third person games, how the SL camera interacts with environments, how it impacts our ability to navigate environments in SL and some explanation of how the camera works with regards to "CameraOffset" and "FocusOffset".

[Jo Yardley]

Just want to add that we have a Relaxed Rules Day in 1920s Berlin today.

So if you want to visit a city build with a realistic scale in mind, come on over and wander around.

Today we don't have a 1920s dresscode rule and all avatars are welcome as long as you're not running around all naked or in nazi uniforms, we have kids here.

[Jo Yardley]

Today we have created a 'Realistic Proportioned Avatar set'.

It is stuffed with all sorts of goodies that will help you make your avatar more realistic IF you want to give that a try or at least understand proportions more and experiment with this.

Inside the kit you will find pictures and prims based on the famous Loomis proportions, Vitruvian shapes made by Penny Patton, measurement blocks and the great TMT pose stand device made by Tikuf Arun.

Our sim is semi-realistic scale so we are handing this set out for free with perms at our teleport area.

People don't HAVE to get realistic avatars, BUT IF you want to experiment or at least see how tall a properly proportioned avatar looks like, come check it out.

You can come get the set, experiment or give it to friends.

You can find it at our teleport area by the steps to the station.

http://slurl.com/secondlife/1920s%20Berlin/208/238/751

[Voltek Atansoff]

I'm not that much used to answer or write in the forum, mainly because English is not my mother tongue and putting down in words a comprehensive thought isn't always as easy as I wished for.

Anyway I will try on this one  

First of all, I had been awesomely (is that English ?) impressed by you post Penny.

Now what I have in mind

Why not to do some kind of SL group (maybe 2, one for builders, and one for users) that would abide to some simple rules and statements provided by your insightful thinking. The purpose would be to have a collection of builders and content creators building according to human scaling. This group could also provide some kind of Logo to include in each creation built according the chart. The second group (if the idea appeal to everyone) would be a Finder Group to anyone looking for stuff correctly scaled. Some kind of advertising and information group said differently. Of course the first one would be a help, information and gathering group for the first category, I.E... Builders and creators, and also the access to have the right to use the logo. 

Just to finish, maybe the first group could be called "The Vitruvian Guild"

or anything else

I hope my idea is sufficiently clear to understand (remember , English not my mother tongue sorry for it not to be as good as I want). Have a good day all

[Void Singer]

I hope you stuck penny's camera hud and settings thing in there too....makes a huge difference in perception.

[Zewe Major]

Penny, thanks for your deliberate treatment of what is an unnecessary problem within SL. I couldn' t agree more with you article and especially appreciate that you brought up the finite land issue. Meisterbastler and its neighboring sims (hereafter MBK) also adhere to the 1:1 scale philosophy you've described. One of my biggest frustrations is with vehicles. We try to make MBK a car friendly place but I remain frustrated that even some of the best and most prolific carmakers out there insist on using a 1:1.3 scale when making vehicles. As a result, lanes must be wider curves take wider radii and garage-type buildings must all be larger to accommodate the larger size cars. Of course it is no surprise why the cars must be larger - go to MBK and grab a free ccurately scaled German sports car, and the typical avatar's head will stick through the roof. We also understand why carmakers want to protect their product and make them No Mod. But really, how hard is it for makers to build to scale and when complete, copy it and stretch the vehicle 30% then put no mod copies of both in the box for sale?

 

Back to the land, We have to pay a great deal for a 256m x 256m piece of virtual turf - I won't stand for having it reduced to 197m x 197m because the average avatar is 120% of normal height and drives around in a car that is 130% of normal size. Recently I reduced all my roadways from 10 m for a two lane to 8 m - it is still larger than the typical RL lane width of 3m, but the savings in space was amazing.

 

Another problem is that a lot of the freebie and gigantic body shapes out there are no mod, so new avatars have to adapt all their stuff to an oversize shape and changing when they figure out how becomes too hard. To help deal with this we have set up some freebie full perm body shapes that are typical for RL males and females, plus some tips on how to retain face shapes and such while not distorting the height with the 4 critical sliders (height, neck length, torso length, & leg length) finally we liberally distribute Sathirali Yoshika's Height Calculator, which is the only height calculator I know of in SL that consistently measures height correctly, and is easily verified with a prim size.

 

Ok. End rant. Thanks for reading. Cheers, Zewe Major, Burgermeister of MBK

[Jo Yardley]

I got sick of cars in SL as well, they were all too big!

So we had someone make cars just for our sim, the fantastic Dixi, very first BMW from 1929

I can't tell you how great it is to finally see normal cars!

[Lonewolf Lightworker]

http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Second-Life-Viewer/Linden-Lab-needs-to-stop-a-big-argument-quot-on-avatar-feet-quot/td-p/1042345

[Senga Recreant]

I have a number of avatars, because I tend to "compartmentalize" my moods into seperate SL identities.

 

For the most part, they are between 5'4" and 6'2" tall. And though they generally are pleasantly feminine in shape (even as Penny herself is) I do still occasionally get an 8 foot tall noob calling me a child.

 

That's only an occasional problem, though.

 

My most frequently used avatar, Senga Recreant, is 8'2". However, she isn't human. She's a huge, lanky demoness. I am aware of my enormous scale and I don't expect content creators to scale to me. I am capable of fitting modestly sized attachments (unless they're poorly made to begin with) and even while being enormous, I take the opportunity to warn normally scaled avatars of unshrinkable items (such as in my review of the digigrade 'Koras' boots on the marketplace).

 

I stress again, I am AWARE of my scale. If i can't explore a build because I'm too tall... i change avatars. Even if I have to change into a micro. I don't throw a fit about it. If i can't fit a pair of boots to my legs, i shrug and bury them in inventory. I don't throw a fit about it. But now I am experiencing the opposite bias that my other avatars do.

 

People ridicule me for my height, even though I am aware of my height, and I have never ever implied that normally scaled adult avatars are children (unless they are OBVIOUSLY children, breastless, pigtailed, teddybear toting avatars in a sex sim). Penny's personal crusade has been successful to the point where I'm almost at loathe to even speak to someone normal sized, because so often they're so militant about it that they refuse to acknowledge that towering over them is the entire point of my persona and character.

[Penny Patton]

---

Senga Recreant wrote:

Penny's personal crusade has been successful to the point where I'm almost at loathe to even speak to someone normal sized, because so often they're so militant about it that they refuse to acknowledge that towering over them is the entire point of my persona and character.

---

 I'm truly sorry you're running into these kinds of reactions in SL, but don't you think it's maybe a bit disingenous to blame me for it? I have always discouraged this kind of behaviour, in this and many other threads I have repeatedly stressed that it is not at all helpful and just muddies discourse on the topic.

 I am not the only person aware of SL's scale problems and pointing them out, I'm just someone with the right mix of design and education experience to put it into terms that those without such experience can, hopefully, understand more easily.

The people you describe would be here treating you in precisely the same way whether I was in SL or not.

[Gospel Voom]

Excellent OP.

From an apparel and avatar accessory perspective the giantism preferred by many creates a uniue set of challenges - knee high boots for example are very hard to make in aesthetic proportions. Three feet of lower leg on a size 0 foot tends to look a bit like a golf club.

Back when I was developing immersive-learning simulations we had huge problems implementing true RL proportions due to the high, wide and handsom nature of the default camera position. We simply had to scale everything up in order to accomodate the least camera proficent users.

[Codex Alpha]

Its 2013 now, and I agree with this. Building my own stuff, I am building to scale for my 5'8 avatar, and everything else seems grossly out of scale.

I can't even buy furniture from any store, because I look like a little kid on the "Great Big Comfy Couch" because even the simple armchairs are DOUBLE the size they should be.

For example, if I plop a default prim on the ground that is 0.5mx0.5m. My avatar sits perfectly on it, my feet are on the ground planted properly, and this is how furniture should be built around it.

How many sofa sets do you see where the back of them come up to your face? Not much. I could go on, but there's so much.

All I can say, is if and when I can get building furniture and props, etc, they will be to scale for the average height human, not the superhero and monster sized avatars walking around.

[Marduk Martinek]

Great article Penny. I would love to see more things and people at a better scale. I have always tried to keep my size at about 5'7" to match my own height and have always found it odd so see the majprity of things and people looming over me. An interesting thing I've noticed is that the majority of anime or furry avitars do tend to be on the "smaller" side of things. Most seem to range from about 5'5" to 6'5" and places built at a cohesive scale that size do feel so much bigger.

 

A good place I've recently found that is built to a more realistic scale is Hentai High. They've managed multiple school buildings, an athletic feild, maze, beach, small town, hot spring, temple area and still have open space and that is all on ground level. I've seen sims the same size where they can only fit four houses or buildimgs in it and almost no external decoration.

 

I really like your idea about doing builds for av items on a very small av shape then sizing up. I've been dissipointed more than a few times by getting a mesh clothing item that has no demo available bit says it has sizes xxs to xxl "to fit any av" only to find out that at 5'7" the xxs size makes me look like a five year old trying on his dad's clothes, and being rigged mesh it can't be resized.