Scale in Second Life

[Rowan Amore]

2 hours ago, rasterscan said:

I can't really stand being inside buildings in SL, they usually feel far to claustrophobic, and I say that as a competent camera mode user - alt mouse and ctrl alt mouse. Viz a viz I'm usually to be found on a deckchair or blanket on the beach. Hope that helps

 

Have you tried resetting the default camera position?   This is my default rear view inside a very small trailer home.

This is moving around inside which is much easier when you change default camera position...https://gyazo.com/9f990d8234f3a2f6d0edab5cca551126

[Quistess Alpha]

6 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

moving around inside

I use a custom script to change my walk speed and camera angle, though using the built in camera settings is almost as good. A blurry video I made over a year ago:

and the script:

though might be a bit buggy.

[Blush Bravin]

My answer to dealing with ceilings at home. I pretty much live on the top deck of my houseboat. The bedroom and bath are downstairs where the illusion of privacy is desired, but give me wide open spaces and water that disappears into the sunrise, and I'm a happy resident. Only scale I'm concerned with is does my avatar look realistically sized for my furniture.

[Nalates Urriah]

The use of the word "scale" is interesting. SL does NOT have a scaling problem. The scale is set. One integer unit of distance is a meter.

Viewers have a calibration error. Which is why people use a prim to get precise height for an avatar. Bit it isn't just the viewer's calibration that is a problem. Deformers, system shoes, and other settings complicate how a viewer calculates avatar height.

Our buildings  are disproportionate because of the 3rd person camera viewers use by default. I solved that problem for my self when I stopped using the default camera position and set my own. See: Second Life Camera Position Tips. For a time Penny Paton was on a mission to get builders to build better in SL. She also was on about camera position (here). Dig around in her blog and check out her articles on building and use of textures.

Taken in region Shopping Therapy.

On 6/13/2024 at 6:20 AM, Cougar Sangria said:

I'm not into following the masses, as sometimes the M is silent. I've been tall (but not overly tall) since I was two weeks old, and I'm comfortable with that. It's SL—my world, my imagination. Just like in first life, we come in all shapes and sizes. This subject has been beaten to death. It's time to let it go.

I would agree except we constantly have new people coming in. We or the new bring things up which the new are ignorant of. So, rehashing occasionally is a good thing.

4 hours ago, rasterscan said:

I can't really stand being inside buildings in SL, they usually feel far to claustrophobic, and I say that as a competent camera mode user - alt mouse and ctrl alt mouse. Viz a viz I'm usually to be found on a deckchair or blanket on the beach. Hope that helps

Changing the camera's default position does NOT eliminate the need to have good camera skills. It just gives one a better starting place. And it helps when one is inside. Rowan provided a picture of how adjusted position can save one from having to constantly mess with the camera.

For my shopping expeditions I really like my SpaceNavigator and Flycam mode.

 

[Dorientje Woller]

4 hours ago, elleevelyn said:

i checked this. You right seems Linden have done something wonky

Girl Next Door is 1.72m (out-of-the-box) according to Linden Viewer Second Life Release 7.1.8.9375512768 (64bit)

here against a 1.72m prim

the difference between eye-level and top of head has been deducted from the old, rather than added

Perfect example of feeling boxed in

[Starberry Passion]

Yeah, like I said, second life updated their Height scaling, if you were tall, and you want to be that tall again, you have to technically get taller, since you're now shorter by Second life metrix. You can stay the new height or you can grow even longer.

[animats]

I have a notecard I give out on sizing in SL.
 

# Typical real-world size information for objects in Second Life

All dimensions in meters. Data from various architectural sources.
Rounded off to 0.005m.

#   Furniture

Dining table height     0.750
Chair height            0.460
Kitchen counter height  0.915
Bar height              1.010
    
#  Buildings
 
Door height             2.135
Door width              0.920
Brick dimensions        0.100 × 0.070 × 0.200
Cinderblock dimensions  0.410 × 0.200 × 0.200
Stair tread height      0.180
Stair tread spacing     0.280

(Brick and cinderblock dimensions include mortar, so these
values are suitable for repeating textures.)
(Stair tread spacing is a minimum.)

That's how the real world is built. If you stay close to real world sizes, things will look reasonable. In particular, use standard stair tread height and brick sizes, or your build will look subtly wrong.

Door heights and ceiling heights can be increased in SL to help with camera problems. Historically, avatars in SL were taller than they are now.  Some buildings were sized accordingly. Visit the old office building at Linden Estate Services, which is scaled for giants at least 2x human height.

[Starberry Passion]

I'm 5'1" in this photo (according to the appearance editor) and with my platforms, that adds at least 6 - 7 inches, my house makes me look like the tiniest of people while I am inside of it. It's like I'm living with a giant but I'm on my own. My door to my house that I purchased is at least 13 - 14 feet door. 14f x 5.5f at least

This makes average height look even smaller than it is, not to mention camera placement, so when you're looking at some and your camera over shoulder, will make them look smaller, which is technically how taller people see shorter people.

But this isn't fair to average height people that everything is this big, then you tell them they are children on top of that, because you're some giant. Second life, for a long time, never looked at height as child, but the community always believed they did because of scare tactics and people pushing height rules, since many male avatars, yes it is because male avatars mainly, are 7 ft+ individuals that make shorter women look so tiny in comparison.

You couple that with those people and it's suddenly "That's a child avatar" making everyone afraid to be a realistic height in second life. People, also, have been advocating for more realistic things, except when it comes to height that's out of the picture to several people still.

I don't have a problem with giant people or tall people, but other complaining about shortness is b.s. and chases people off. it's not my fault this door is this big and if second life didn't want me to be this short, they would've disallowed it in the first place, and we'd be all giants.

There have been more and more people starting to go realistic heights, however. More people are going less giant, they don't want to be a stretched out version of themselves and a lot of women now don't want someone to tell them how tall they have to be to enjoy themselves.

I, myself, like to see a ride variety of avatars, short to tall, skinny to big, I don't mind it but you cannot go around and call people what they're not because of your height and or viewpoint. Yes, second life scales things up but Lindens didn't give a rule that everything has to be tall, it was the community.

The community started that, from what I've been told by several people. What happen, according to them, was "some guy maxed out his height and then everyone else started doing it and it stuck," then every time someone new came into being, they looked so tiny that it could only mean one thing, it's a child.

What people don't understand is if Lindens view second life as if it was real life, despite it being a fantasy world, this means that they take into the account that there are different people, short people, tall people, big people, little people, dwarfism and many other things. This also mean that they take into the account fantasies that exist inside of people and they want people to feel comfortable with their world, this includes height.

I know someone is going to say "no one made them chose to be that height, they chose to be that height." What's your point? No one made anyone be any height in irl either, unless they go online and pretend to be a different height. Let's say you're 5'3", average normal global height, women are and have always been short, really short, on average, no one made you be that short, it was a natural thing. There are those who love their height, there are those who want to be short at the same time. 

My point is, Linden's didn't make the world of Second life a place where you have to scale everything to fit into the world, the Community did.

Look at several of the Linden's avatars, you'll find some of them to be short, reasonable heights, while a lot the community tower over them. Then you have people who get defensive over certain things, when the lindens too are inside of those groups, not talking about child avatars, Not Kiera Linden, when she was at the round table meeting, she was in Kawaii fashion, yet the Kawaii and BBG community was thinking they were going to destroy the community while Kiera Linden looked like she enjoyed kawaii looks. She was in hot pink, wearing hot pink sneakers, an adult avatar.

People are starting to move towards expressive themselves how they want to express themselves and some people in the community are upset about it, same with height.

Some people want there to be a Height limit to adult, that's why they scale things up to be taller so that they can force you to be a certain height, it's not enough to ask someone their age, look at their profile for information. So it's not really that Second life has a scaling problem, it's the community have a controlling problem that make people believe second life has a scaling problem and they are forced into being slender men and slender women and making giant things for giant people and people believing that second life still has a height limit, when it doesn't have one.

[Bree Giffen]

Try measuring a room you use in real life and recreate a basic prim version in SL. It will be very small. It also gives you a sense of how tall your avatar is because you can imagine your avatar walking around in that very room. When I tried it, my avatar would smash through the ceiling if she stood up straight. It was disturbing and I immediately shrank my avatar down to a more realistic size. Still makes me feel uneasy when I think of a gigantic Bree crouching down to get through the doorway.

[Starberry Passion]

58 minutes ago, Bree Giffen said:

Try measuring a room you use in real life and recreate a basic prim version in SL. It will be very small. It also gives you a sense of how tall your avatar is because you can imagine your avatar walking around in that very room. When I tried it, my avatar would smash through the ceiling if she stood up straight. It was disturbing and I immediately shrank my avatar down to a more realistic size. Still makes me feel uneasy when I think of a gigantic Bree crouching down to get through the doorway.

I did the same thing, not to mention I dislike being tall, personally. I like others being tall. My brothers are taller than I, my dad is taller, My mom is taller I'm only taller than my grandma. hahaha, she's 4'9"

[JacksLiver]

On 6/13/2024 at 10:46 AM, Conifer Dada said:

I know this topic has been covered before but it's worth coming back to.

Say you want your avatar to be 5ft 6in tall (1.68m) tall. Using the standard Linden Lab viewer, if you set that height on the shape slider, you'll be considerably taller than a prim of the same height. In other words, there's a mismatch between the scale of the appearance slider and that of of prims.

I use the Alchemy viewer, where the shape slider value has been amended to correspond very closely to prim scale. The same is true of Firestorm. Yet we still have this scale discrepancy on the LL viewer.

I don't know how much people are bothered about scale in SL. Some people probably just want their avatar to be big to dominate the dancefloor, or maybe they just don't care about scale at all. Certainly some builders don't seem too bothered about scale when it comes to buildings or furniture, which matters if it's no-mod!

I wonder why LL never amended the height scale on the shape slider. As well as that being amended, it would be useful to have a new 'scale' slider that lets you alter the size of your avatar without affecting any proportions.

A Regular mesh head is 75 on the Shape slider, a body is 7,5x the head size or 8 if you want it more elongated. a Hand is the size of your face. Doesn't matter how tall the Height Value is marked, that's Anathomy 1 on 1. Linden Lab did mess up the scale on release and after that all builds  been done accordingly to that, furniture, etc. You look around on a regular club and people are about that size about 2 to 2.3 m tall. If you're a male and are bellow 2 meters in height, you're to be considered a child avatar. Do not use this scale loophole to bend the rules, stay in your G rated Regions. 

[Rowan Amore]

2 minutes ago, JacksLiver said:

Do not use this scale loophole to bend the rules, stay in your G rated Regions.

Um, there is no loophole because there is no rule that adult avatars need to be a certain height.   Certain region owners might have arbitrary height requirements but LL does not.

[JacksLiver]

1 minute ago, Rowan Amore said:

Um, there is no loophole because there is no rule that adult avatars need to be a certain height.   Certain region owners might have arbitrary height requirements but LL does not.

There's been used as an excuse by certain people, which created a loophole. Unless you're a dwarf, using the Golden Ratio (look it up), that's what you get. Everything else is just an excuse to validate some unwated behaviours.

[JacksLiver]

On 6/16/2024 at 3:33 AM, Bree Giffen said:

Try measuring a room you use in real life and recreate a basic prim version in SL. It will be very small. It also gives you a sense of how tall your avatar is because you can imagine your avatar walking around in that very room. When I tried it, my avatar would smash through the ceiling if she stood up straight. It was disturbing and I immediately shrank my avatar down to a more realistic size. Still makes me feel uneasy when I think of a gigantic Bree crouching down to get through the doorway.

Exactly, Real Life Scale is not valid in Second Life. It's not your avatar that is huge, it's the initial scale error that made it happen that way, so there's Real Life Scale and Second Life scale.  When in Second Life, use Second Life's. Adjust yourself to the world around you, don't try to adjust the world to you. When that scale error was spotted was too late o set the toothpaste back in the tube, it's pointless to even try.

[Rowan Amore]

52 minutes ago, JacksLiver said:

There's been used as an excuse by certain people, which created a loophole. Unless you're a dwarf, using the Golden Ratio (look it up), that's what you get. Everything else is just an excuse to validate some unwated behaviours.

I see short men all the time.  Region owners don't need a loophole to not allow people in.   They can decide no to allow male avatars, avatars with blonde hair, no shirt, no shoes, no service.   

Also, it's the default camera angle, which most people never adjust, that initially caused a lot of buildings to be made larger than scale.  

[Love Zhaoying]

7 minutes ago, Rowan Amore said:

They can decide no to allow male avatars, avatars with blonde hair, no shirt, no shoes, no service.   

Ok, I'll take a shirtless blonde male avatar.

[JacksLiver]

That's not the point. It's a few centimeters gap, 2,20 m tall is about 1,80 m in Real Life. We're playing match with the environment itself (Look at Grass textures scale or default hair sizes for example). I'm not going to extremes, and I don't mind how tall you choose to be, there's short people in Real Life too and that's ok as long as you use the Golden Ratio. It's about people going to the extent to use deformers to alter the mesh and using it as an excuse to have certain behaviours while bending ToS to their whims, and yes, that's real.

[Blush Bravin]

2 hours ago, JacksLiver said:

There's been used as an excuse by certain people, which created a loophole. Unless you're a dwarf, using the Golden Ratio (look it up), that's what you get. Everything else is just an excuse to validate some unwated behaviours.

The golden ratio is applied to any, ANY height. You can use it to be 1 m tall or 6 m tall. If you look at the original avatars provided by the lab, they were not giants. Most were at or just under 2m tall. It's the camera angle that caused all the problems. In the past five, or so, years we've seen a substantial shift toward more natural heights for avatars and objects. Sure we still have mega huge buildings and furnishings in world, but by far, most current content is made with more realistic heights in mind. It's been a very welcomed improvement.

[JacksLiver]

1 minute ago, Blush Bravin said:

The golden ratio is applied to any, ANY height. You can use it to be 1 m tall or 6 m tall. If you look at the original avatars provided by the lab, they were not giants. Most were at or just under 2m tall. It's the camera angle that caused all the problems. In the past five, or so, years we've seen a substantial shift toward more natural heights for avatars and objects. Sure we still have mega huge buildings and furnishings in world, but by far, most current content is made with more realistic heights in mind. It's been a very welcomed improvement.

I just said that on my last post a few minutes ago. I know.

[Rowan Amore]

1 minute ago, Blush Bravin said:

The golden ratio is applied to any, ANY height. You can use it to be 1 m tall or 6 m tall. If you look at the original avatars provided by the lab, they were not giants. Most were at or just under 2m tall. It's the camera angle that caused all the problems. In the past five, or so, years we've seen a substantial shift toward more natural heights for avatars and objects. Sure we still have mega huge buildings and furnishings in world, but by far, most current content is made with more realistic heights in mind. It's been a very welcomed improvement.

Why hasn't LL changed the default camera angle is beyond me.  That was the first thing I did when I downloaded the official viewer last year.  I hadn't used that thing in years but they still had that god-awful camera angle.  

[Blush Bravin]

Just now, Rowan Amore said:

Why hasn't LL changed the default camera angle is beyond me.  That was the first thing I did when I downloaded the official viewer last year.  I hadn't used that thing in years but they still had that god-awful camera angle.  

That's a good question for  https://feedback.secondlife.com/

Pretty sure it would get upvoted a lot.

[Rowan Amore]

11 minutes ago, Blush Bravin said:

That's a good question for  https://feedback.secondlife.com/

Pretty sure it would get upvoted a lot.

Update Default Camera Angle | Voters | Second Life

[Charalyne Blackwood]

I shouldn't be penalized for having my avatars at my RL height of 5 foot 4 (yes, I realize it's an approximation due to the differences in scaling between viewers). I shouldn't be criticized for it. I'm clearly *not* a child avatar. If you see me as a child, that says volumes more about you than it does about me.

[Katherine Heartsong]

I go by a prim. I want to be (an apparent) 180cm in world?

I either use my own proportion guide prim, or I create four 45cm prims in alternating colours, stack them, and adjust my height after all the other settings (torso, legs, hips) etc to have the top of my head at the top of those 180cm pile of prims.

It's done as four for me to get the body proportionally correct to an 8:1 artist's model ratio. Knees, V of crotch, breasts, shoulders at the "right" heights etc.

[Clem Marques]

On 6/14/2024 at 3:59 AM, PheebyKatz said:

I'll be damned if I make everyone sit in oversized armchairs, though. Those are just a little too 2009.

I miss the goofiness of those. Good times