Most Avatars have their arms too short

[Ishtara Rothschild]

I blame the default values. If you set every slider to 50, you should end up with something that looks like a perfectly healthy and anatomically normal human being, but instead you end up with a... no idea what it is exactly. All I know is that Linden Lab has dubbed this creature Ruth and that it appears to be physically incapable of wiping its own butt.

[Ishtara Rothschild]

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Treyu wrote:

As an artist, I absolutely agree with this! 

Even 'anime' and 'chibi' (extremely deformed) artists must understand the basics of human anatomy to get the desired effects they are looking for... otherwise they just don't look lifelike at all.

 

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Chibi Ishy approves of this post.

(Edited because I quoted the wrong part of Treyu's post).

[Penny Patton]

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Ishtara Rothschild wrote:

I blame the default values. If you set every slider to 50, you should end up with something that looks like a perfectly healthy and anatomically normal human being, but instead you end up with a... no idea what it is exactly. All I know is that Linden Lab has dubbed this creature Ruth and that it appears to be physically incapable of wiping its own butt.

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Actually, that's incorrect. With an all-50's avatar you wind up with something far worse than Ruth.

 

 

Heads too small, arms too short (moreso on the female mesh due to differently skewed proportion sliders between the sexes), hands and feet too large, pointy ears...these aren't even human.

[Penny Patton]

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Shiori Carter wrote:

I think its the opposite, those with there arms to long looks like apes trying to walk.  

 

So, you can push you arms down, but it just does not look right in SL to me, like i said, you look like an monkey.

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 It's actually, in most cases, physically impossible for a female avatar to have arms that are too long for her body. Especially with the ridiculously oversized avatars most people have due to the defaults starting near 7' tall.

 An avatar with an average woman's height of 5'5" needs the arms set around 90 to get proper arm length. The taller your avatar, the longer your arms need to be to remain proportional. After about 6' you need to push the slider past 100 to maintain proportions, which, of course, you can't. Most SL women are well over 6' tall.

 With men it's more possible, as the arm slider for men is skewed differently. Men needs their arm slider at around 60 to remain proportional on a 6' male shape.

 If that looks "ape like" to you, then either your perception has simply been skewed by spending too much time in SL where freakishly short arms are the norm or you believe every man, women and child you see in your everyday life looks "ape like" as, outside of thalidomide victims and other physical deformities, basic human proportions are pretty universal.

[Ishtara Rothschild]

You're right... that is far worse than Ruth *shudders* :matte-motes-shocked:

[Melita Magic]

My avatar used to have arms that ended at about the hip bone. I just did not want to look like a human version of an orangutan. But they are longer now. It still looks weird to me sometimes but having an AO where my arms are raised a lot of the time helps.

I have kind of long arms in real life so I might have been skeevy on the issue for that reason. 

I think when you are in edit appearance mode the arms look much much longer in that pose, than they do when your av is just standing around. I think that's where a lot of this comes in. Also a lot of new people don't know how to turn their camera to look at themselves from all angles yet.

Sometimes I see avatars with arms that are way too bulky and long and they look simian to me.

[Coby Foden]

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Dana Hickman wrote:

Standing straight up with hands at sides, a line from wristbone to wristbone should cross halfway between naval and genitals. Fingertips should reach to "bottom of pants pocket" length

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In normal human the wristbones are about the level of the crotch. And the fingertips reach down to mid thigh. Easy to verify by standing in front of a mirror...

At first this normal human proportion may look a bit strange in avatar as our eyes have been "ruined" in seeing lots of avies with too short arms. I made my arms long like this and I can say that it looks beautiful and natural. Not anything like orangutan :matte-motes-big-grin-wink:

[Penny Patton]

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Coby Foden wrote:

At first this normal human proportion may look a bit strange in avatar as our eyes have been "ruined" in seeing lots of avies with too short arms. I made my arms long like this and I can say that it looks beautiful and natural. Not anything like orangutan :matte-motes-big-grin-wink:

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This is definitely true.

Around 2008 I started more thgoroughly checking the proportions in my own shape and lengthened my arms appropriately. It looked odd for about a minute

 One major benfit to a properly proportional avatar is that most animations used in SL are created in third party software, software which provides the animation creator with properly proportional shapes to make their animations with.

 What's that mean to you and I? It means that most animations in SL will actually work far better with a well proportioned avatar. Those "hands on hip" poses that wind up shoving your hands into your midsection actually work! That hand brushing fingers through your hair standing pose that instead has your avatar sliding your hand across your face? With properly long arms it actually works!

[Venus Petrov]

@Maya:  I think this view of 'arms too short' is consistent with your earlier call for building standards.  /me smiles

I see all kinds of avies in the club where I DJ and each is created according to his/her operator's wishes.  Variety is the spice, no? 

[Pussycat Catnap]

It took me about 1 hour with my 'Reggae' alt to get used to the long arms.

It took me 3 days or so with Pussycat though. Because I was so used to short arms for so many years... But once I got to that point with her... everyone else in SL started looking weird to me, and I started really noticing the people who - short or tall - had good limb proportions.

Now my avatar looks like a 'person' a lot more to me, despite her cat ears. And even my full furry avatars look more like 'people' to me now.

- Some kind of barrier I had not been as fully aware of before is now no longer 'blocking' my view.

 

Good proportions go a -LONG- way. Scale is still something I feel very strongly about, but proportions is even -more- vital.

And no matter scale you do art or model work in, proportions always remain scientificly, mathematically, constant.

- You can ONLY be either right, or wrong, about them. Opinion is moot. Its like gravity.

 

[Mayalily]

I like!  This is pretty much what I see when I look in the mirror.  I think I need mine just a little longer to about 80, unless I'm going to decide to lower my height. 

 

[Mayalily]

Yeah variety is!  No doubt, but what I think happened to me and why my arms were so short for the first three months was 1) I had a lot to do and learn, and 2) There is no exact space for arms.  Arms is in the torso area, I believe.

What I see is a lot of tiny arms, so let's just take a figure any figure... I used 10 million users in one of my posts in this thread... so 10 million users can't have the same imagination to have child size arms but adult sized everything else.  For some reason, it's always the arms that seem forgotten.  Could be because arms are in the torso area, but I'm not sure why so many like tiny arms.  Maybe it's becuz, as said in this thread, they feel they look like apes.  But what I see is tall giant legs and short arms, so it looks off balance; adult legs, child arms, and that only exagerates the very tall legs, and then the avatar looks all legs; more like a daddy long legs spider.  Some people see apes, I see spiders. 

Does it bother me?  Sometimes, but mostly NO 'cuz I've had tons of fun dancing with one foot gone or one whole leg gone, while someone else may have had a little head upon ginormous muscles or ginormously long legs with little stubby arms.  So, in the end, it's all good.  However, to tell the truth, I wish someone had told me months ago that my arms were too short 'cuz i like my arms better now. 

Also, if the shapes came with a basic guide of where to set your arms to your height, AND THEN people chose short arms, then that would indeed be their imagination at work.  I don't think this is a your world, your imagination thing.  I think it's simply that a basic guide should be included when we buy a shape; then we decide what IS our imagination as it breaks the rules of the guide to feed what our imagination wants. 

But I don't think that is what this is that all these avatars have the same imagaination to have short arms.  I think it's two things, 1) Arms don't have a separate category, and 2) No basic guide with shapes to at least get arm length appropriate to height and legs. 

oh and at PC (a little off topic for a sec):  I bought my second non-scripted hair and I love it!  Going for a third!   I love the new hair I got and has no scripts. 

[Venus Petrov]

Other than look at oneself in the mirror or have an artist eye, one might seek out information such as this if one is interested in knowing more about proportions.  Happy reading!