Penny Patton

Knowl Paine wrote: There was an announcement but not by LL Jun 27, 2011 – WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court says California cannot ban the rental or sale of violent video games to children. Talk about non-sequitur. These topics are not related at all. Anyways, I'm sure someone must have pointed it out by now but it's worth saying again, any minor could easily grab a celebrity's ID info off the internet and "verify" through the old system. It was worthless and broken. It probably kept more legitimate, rule abiding adults out than minors.

"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder", however the human mind is hard wired so most of us find certain things attractive. A "good" shape will always have good proportions. Unless someone has a fetish for thalidomide victims, "t-rex" arms are never attractive. People like long legs, but if you push the slider over to stork territory, that's not going to help you either. A solid understanding of human proportions is necessary, especially because LL's starter shapes lack any such understanding, and they provide us with no tools to guide us towards creating better shapes. When you go to make a shape, use your search engine of choice to find some artists' guides on human proportion and look up one of the many SL avatar proportion guides to learn how to use prims and a pose stand to check your own proportions. Pussycat Catnap has a great one up where she added some helpful screenshots to proportion checking instructions I'd posted to another thread on the topic. There's also the limts of the appearance editor/SL avatar mesh. If you go too thin it causes flaws in the mesh to become more apparent in addition to making it look like your avatar has an eating disorder. Too fat and you run into the same problem. You need to know the mesh's limits to strike a good balance, thankfully there's plenty of room for variety within that balance. Beyond that you enter the realm of personal preference. Some people like thicker, curvier girls. Other people like more slender, waif-lik girls. Some people prefere beefy macho men, others trim yet athletic hipsters. Some people like fat, some people like thin. Personally, one thing that stands out to me with guys whose avatars are sized accordingly with the type of appearance they're wearing. A human guy who's between 5'5" and 6'2" is great. It shows both an understanding of content creation in SL, and the confidence to buck the trend of 8' tall guys. I also really love to see shapes that aren't trying to be attractive. SL doesn't have nearly enough short, fat, old people. Character goes a long way. Would love to see more characters in SL, most people go for super models. There's room enough for both.

Perrie Juran wrote: It would be nice if Linden Lab could just push a button and the entire SL world rescaled to have accurate height measures as you describe. But I don't think it can be done. PROPORTIONS are a huge issue. To just say, reduce all builds by 10% will not work. Too many different things will require too many different adjustments. Whenever I see the topic discussed, the forced shrinking down of avatars en mass is what a lot of the people seem to fear is being requested. It's not, and I believe it would be a very bad idea. I recommend you read the article I linked to, I get into detail on the topic. Suffice to say, even among the 6'8"-8'10" avatars, scale is broken. Encouraging people to scale down over time by the ways I suggest would not make this problem worse than it already is. People greatly exaggerate the difficulties of correcting this issue. Perrie Juran wrote: If I can find it (I think I should still have it), several years ago Bits & Bobs had a note card discussing the challenges of designing and aligning couple poses. It is not as easy as one may think, especially because all Avatars are not the same height. So what they had to do was decide on a happy medium for the default positions. I believe the same is true for the default design of Second Life, and that the default is set to make the basic world look as BELIEVABLE as possible across the widest variety of user's hardware. The difficulties the Bits & Bots notecard explains are correct, but can be diminished greatly if LL and content creators took a few simple steps. It's really not that difficult. LL could do their part in a day if they really wanted to. Content creators can start any time they like, and in doing so actually broaden their market. Seriously, read the article. Perrie Juran wrote: For example, we don't all use the same size monitors set at the same screen resolutions. When SL started, wide screens were the exception. And actually most wide screens violate the Fibonacci series which unknown to many people contributes greatly to eye strain because it forces your eyes to move in an unnatural manner. But regardless of that, the way the world appears on a 15 inch lap top screen is different than how it appears on a 45 inch true 1080i screen. So again, unless you are advocating only people with the highest of high tech should be allowed to enjoy SL, a happy medium has to be struck in order to make the Second Life world enjoyable to the maximum number of users. I'm really not following this at all. Comparing the scale issue to the differences in power between SL users computers is a very poor analogy. Perrie Juran wrote: Overall, it's just not as simple as saying, "OK Linden Lab, wave your magic wand and fix it." Then it's a very good thing that no one has suggested otherwise, isn't it?

Vania Chaplin wrote: And yes, the slider not ever gives you what is necessary. When I was working in arm length, I had to slide it to 100 and was still too short in comparison to the model, as can be seen in the pic above (ok, in that shape the torso is yet You're welcome! The arm length slider is problematic. It is only possible to get proper arm length with the female mesh if you shrink down to around a believable woman's height. About the tallest you can be and still achieve proper arm length is around 6' tall. Most avatars are closer to 7' tall, which makes it impossible to have proportional arms. My avatar is 5'7" tall and I have my arm slider set at 90. Oddly enough, men do not have this problem. They can have proportional arms at around 60 when standing 6' tall. Mens' legs are actually shorter than womens' in the appearance editor, but it is not so extreme as the discrepency in arm length. Regarding the order you'd check proportions, I'd put torso width before arm length. The reason being that your "wingspan" (which includes arm length, torso width and hand size) should be equal to your height.

Perrie Juran wrote: On a final note, I didn't choose my Avatar height per se. I just accepted the Avatar that I was presented with when I started SL. I didn't do it (make it 7 foot tall) as one poster suggested in another thread because I have self esteem issues in RL. It was what it was and it looked "Believable" in the Second Life world. The only thing I changed (downsized) was my prim **bleep** because in RL it would have been considered attack with a deadly weapon. This is an extremely important point. The starter avatars are all about 7' tall. Specifically, the women starters are 6'8" and the men are 7'1". This is the primary reason so many avatars are oversized. Not because of self esteem issues or a desire to be deliberately that tall, but because that is how tall LL started them. Add to that the broken appearance editor displaying incorrect height (whatever the appearance editor tells you your height is is actually about 6 inches shorter than what you really are) and the fact that for the better part of SL's existance there was absolutely no height indication in the appearance editor at all. To top it all off, creating a shape in SL is actually pretty difficult, and the shapes LL provides when you try to create a new shape are all way too large and have extremely poor proportions. I'd like to see LL provide a full set of starter shape templates, featuring a range of sizes, body types and builds to help people who are trying to create a new shape.

honerken wrote: It's like I can't go anywhere these days without someone complaining that my avatar is too tall. I didn't know SL was real life, and we have to look 'realistic'. Perhaps I should just walk around a 2 foot gnome. I'll show them. There's actually a lot of problems created in SL by the average avatar being 7' or taller. Land size is constant, so think of it like you live in a 20mx20m box. If you build a house 20mx20m, you've eaten up all your land. If you build a house 10mx10m you could build four such houses. Or one such house, a scenic landscape and an outdoor patio from which to admire it. I wrote an article detailing all of the issues with scale in SL over in the Building and Texturing forum. I see the whole issue as a failure of design on LL's part, but one they can easily correct at any point in time to the benefit of us all. It really has nothing to do with being "realistic" and everything to do with SL's content creation limitations, the effects of scale on static land sizes, and our aility to create a wider variety of creative avatars if people wouldn't all squeeze into the extremely tall end of the spectrum. I believe that it's good to share information about the effects of scale on SL, but that is in no way a judgement on tall avatars or a demand that they re-size themselves. LL themselves can easily correct the issue by taking steps I detail in the linked article.

In addition, if you're including the prim as a wearable item, you might want to create two versions. One for men, one for women and scale the figure so that it is average height for that gender. 5'5"/1.65m for women, 5'10"1.78m for men. Or maybe idealize it to 5'8" and 6' tall.

This seems like a useful visualization for many. I've always wanted LL to add a silhouette like this to the appearance editor itself. Unfortunately, Linden Lab never quite understood that understanding of human proportion is not common, as a result the tools they provide for appearance editing are horribly inadequate for the average SL user. The starter shapes they provide are just as bad. Seven feet tall, short "t-rex" arms, 9+ heads high...to get a good shape in SL you basically need to remake everything from scratch. A few points that might be useful. Eight heads tall is considered "idealistic" Generally an 8 head tall individual will also be tall (around 5'8" for women, 6'2" for men). The average person is between 7 and 7.5 heads tall. Because of how the appearance editor works, it also helps to check proportions in a certain order.You'd want to get your hand size and body width worked out before checking arm length, for example. Another resident, Pussycat Catnap, took a post I'd made about proportions in another thread and added some screenshots to illustrate how to thoroughly check proportions in SL. People can read the blog post here for additional information on achieving good body proportiuons in SL.

I think what Pussycat is trying to say is that, regardless of how easy it is to toss on a different look, far fewer people would to go a place like 1920's Berlin to see its use of scale as opposed to a place without restrictions on appearances. I think she's right on that count, but at the same time there simply aren't that many places on the grid that do showcase the benefits of good use of scale, especially on a full sim level. I linked to Doomed Ship, my own shop and 1920's Berlin. I believe two others have been suggested but I haven't had a chance to check them out yet.

@Josh - Probably bad wording on my part. When I say correct, I mean that if someone is aiming for 6'1" tall, then their avatar being 6'1" tall would be "correct" to them. If they are deliberately aiming for 8' tall, then an avatar height of 8' would be "correct" for them. Incorrect would be an avatar where the person believes their avatar to be 6'1", but is actually over 8' tall. My intention is what it's always been, LL providing more realistically average/idealized avatars to new users, correcting the height displayed in the appearance editor, and fixing SL's camera placement. I do not wish LL to forcibly re-size anyone, redefine the SL metre, or any other drastic action which limits our creative freedom. I would like it very much if no-mod items were at least made re-sizable but I do not see LL doing this, and I would expect a lot of opposition. One actually reasonable argument against it is that re-sizing a scripted object with moving parts can, if the item was not scripted to take this into account, actually break the object.

No one suggested redefining the SL metre. I did cover the problems for animations and other existing content under the current circumstances in the article.

Torley Linden wrote: Is there a compilation of inworld locations that demonstrate the correct proportions Penny describes? I see some examples, but a list in the original post to expand "Existing sims..." — or something others can contribute to like a wiki page — would: Help Resis who agree with these ideas to support each others' firsthand work, and Demonstrate to the curious who don't "get it" yet why it matters, hands-on. Like precedent of other cultural trends/movements that've become wider adopted over time despite initial resistance (as Seth Godin said, it's the lizard brain), it seems like there's big potential here for an advocacy & awareness group, if something like that hasn't already been established. (And I know Penny's done much previous explaining about proper scaling.) I included Doomed Ship, 1920's Berlin and my own shop in the Wastelands as examples people could explore and see for themselves.I probably should have included a list at the end, but in my past few edits of the original post I've been bumping my head against the character limit. I'd love to see more examples, I'm not aware of too many "built to scale" places in SL. I believe once the SL starter avatars are scaled down and SL's default camera placement improved a lot more people will be encouraged to take advantage of scale in their builds. Also, the Viewer 2 appearance editor still displays incorrect height. That really needs to be fixed, either by fixing AgentHeight directly, or by applying a math fudge to get it to display close to accurate height. Nyx Linden said they wanted to correct the root of the problem rather than overlaying a math correction to fix it, but if that is not going to happen anytime soon I'd think a math correction approach would be acceptable until such time as the root problem, AgentHeight, can be corrected.

Elsie Wonder wrote: The base female avatar is Ruth. Up until recently all skins and clothes were made from a template based on her mesh. All animations were based on her mesh too. The degree of joint movements, distance of hand and foot movement ,height for sitting, walking, etc. were all based on Ruth. The further a female avatar deviates from Ruth, the worse her clothes will fit and the worse her skin will look. If the avatar is larger than Ruth then her animations can leave her floating and her feet sliding along the floor when walking. For anyone curious, "Ruth" is 6'4" tall, shorter than the 6'8" female starter avatars but taller than the 5'5" average of North American women. As illustrated in the example avatars provided in the article, it's not difficult to create a scale sized shape where textures are not distorted. Regarding movement, onbly the base system animations would be based on Ruth's shape, and even then I'm not certain that's the case. Much of SL's visual design aspects seem to be implemented without that kind of planning. I can say, however, that animations imported into SL are more affected by deviations from the models used to create those animations. If an animator's model is 5'4" with correctly proportioned arms and legs, then a 7' tall avatar with legs that are too long and arms that are too short will run into problems. When I decided to revamp my avatar with careful, thorough attention to proportion, I found the majority of animations actually began to work much, much better with my shape."hands on hips" poses would actually place myu hands on my hips rather thanb my abdomen. Fingers would actually brush through my hair rather than my face, etcetera. You can see the affect on standing poses as well. Even at 5'7" I've animations that sink my feet into the ground, and others that leave me floating above it. Animators need to pay attention to these settings, and some do mark animations as appropriate for specific heights (although these notifications are often misleading, due to the AgentHeight bug misreporting height) I should try to avoid overstating the effeft on standing poses, however. Only the most observant will notice anything at all as it's usually not a severe offset. Couples poses and ground sits are the animations most affected.

Pussycat Catnap wrote: PS: Those instructions suggest setting one of the values to -7000. I suspect this is a typo and -0.700 was meant instead, since -0.700 gives a result that resembles Penny's screenshots. Thanks for pointing that out, I've corrected the typo!

Melissa Yeuxdoux wrote: Thanks for setting it all down in one place. I choose to be as tall (and leggy) as I can possibly be in SL--guess it comes from watching _Attack of the Fifty-Foot Woman_ and seeing pictures of Anna Swan when I was little--but that's my choice, and having everything out of scale kills the effect, as you show. Bumping my head on the doorway adds to the immersion. I expect I will head to 1920s Berlin at least once just so I can get the feel. Thanks also for the camera setting pointer--I'm hoping that will make it possible for me to negotiate helical staircases on the first try. Hee, you're welcome! Some people make the mistake of thinking this is about maing all avatars a single size and they express concerns about losing diversity. Really,as your experience shows, when everyopne squeezes to one extreme end of the scale or the other you lose diversity. "When everybody is tall, nobody is tall." I want to see more "giant" avatars, which is only possible when the average avatar is a more realistic size.

@Luc I have noticed more scaled down male avatars lately (yesterday I went to the SL8B sims and ran into a 6' guy avatar), but you're quite right that men have always been exceissively taller than women and now they, in general, seem less willing to scale down. I suspect this has to do with perceived social pressures. An unwillingness to be the shortest man in the room. I believe it would be less of an issue once LL started new users out with properly sized avatars and more content creators began building to a sensible scale. As shown earlier in the thread there's already multiple RP areas where everyone is encouraged or required to scale their avatar appropriately, and these areas have plenty of male avatars.

Heh. Actually I'd just come back to post another addendum. Why not scale avatars down even further? Why not scale our avatars down to 1m tall, or 50cm tall? There are several reasons, and they should be obvious with just a little thought. First, we can only scale down avatars so far before it becomes impossible to maintain correct adult proportions. You can get down to about 5' tall and then you need to start making concessions that will quickly leave you with childlike, dwarven shapes. Further still and the mesh just winds up a mess of pinched vertices and clipped polygons. Second, prims have minimum size restrictions as well as maximum size restrictions. Scale down much further than I've suggested and you no longer get additional benefitis of prim efficiency, Further still and it becomes more and more difficult to get the desired detail out of prims because you can't make them small enough. Finally, you begin to run into the same problem of everyone squeezing into one extreme of the spectrum. Just like when everyone is tall, nobody can be tall. When everybody is short, nobody can be short. You hit that wall where creativity and diversity becomes restricted.

Pussycat Catnap wrote: As to the notion of SL scale being 125% of RL - the arm slider doesn't agree... in fact the arm slider is so troubled that I'm not sure even normal scale avatars can have proper arms if they're up to 6' or more. Not sure there... I think the tallest female avatar I've done with proportion checking was either 6' or 6'2" and I managed correct arm legnth. Also, it's important to note that the arm slider issue is only a problem with women avatars. Men with realistically sized avatars can achieve proper arm length at like 60 on the slider. Women of realistic sizes need to be around 90-100. So in scaling up, men have a lot more freedom. At least in that regard. Nika Talaj wrote: It's good information, and I see the point about prim and land usage. The camera setting info is also great. But I wish this whole crusade had never started. Before folks started obsessing about avatar height the world was fairly consistent, if overblown. Now I have a short shape for when I am in the presence of forum & SLU members, and a taller shape for when I am in more public settings. The large shape is particularly useful in some of SL's older, classic builds. I think there was somewhat more consistency in height, as few people went below 6'4", but avatars were still spread out between about 6'6" to 8'10", with that conspicuous rift between men and women that we still see today (and which is the bane of all couples poses). The issues with scale when it came to environments and in-world objects were also always present. But I know what you mean, there wasn't the gaping disparity between the "shorty" avatars and the "giants" that is becoming more and more apparent all the time. I'm just not willing to sacrifice the benefits of better scale, most of all the money it saves me. Because of that, the best solution I see is LL finally realizing the benefits for themselves and hiring a creative team that can put them on track with SL's visual aspects, marketing and general presentation. That would make the transition much smoother for everyone. Nika Talaj wrote: It seems to me that shorter shapes show more distortion when in movement, particularly twisting movements, due to the blockiness in portions of SL's avatar mesh. I wouldn't be surprised if this is why LL ended up skewing avatars tall. I'm not sure I agree with this, I've had a shorter shape now for most of my time in SL, I've created many more, and I've not seen this. At least not since I started going over avatar proportions with a fine toothed comb. I find that most of the concerns people have with shorter avatar shapes have to do with the methods they used to scale down. There is no easy way to scale a shape down, pretty much all proportions need to be adjusted individually which makes for a very time consuming process. Combined with the general lack of good proportions in most avatars, this leads to a lot of problems. I think it would help a lot if LL provided a series of "template" shapes, properly scaled and proportioned, that people could select from either the library or the appearance editor itself when creating a new shape. As it is, even the default "new shapes" are poorly proportioned and well over 6' tall.

Nalates Urriah wrote: If you are thinking of a place to put your information on scale and building in SL, consider putting it in the SL Wiki. Looking into setting this up as an article there. Thanks for the suggestion!

Here's an addendum to the section about camera placement. I included some screenshots to illustrate and a more thorough explanation of the problems with SL's current camera placement. Unfortunately, I've reached the character limit in the original post so I can't add it there directly. 1) They can improve the camera placement. All it takes to vastly improve the SL camera placement is changing a few numbers in the debug menu. Anyone can do this easily, but only a very small minority tend to change defaults so it would be ideal if LL changed the defaults themselves. Instructions on how to do so are here.  Here are some screenshots illustrating what I mean about camera placement. On the left is the default SL camera placement. On the right are my custom settings, which are based on the "over the shoulder" view that has been the popular standard in third person videogames since 2005. In an open air environment there's not too many issues with obscured vision, but you are more detached from your avatar. It's more like watching a character on a screen as opposed to seeing the world first hand. The lower camera angle brings you into the world with your avatar. Once you wander inside, the problems with SL's camera become more apparent. You can see that the camera is pushed close so most of your avatar is cut off, making it more difficult to navigate if the room is furnished or has other obstacles. What can't be shown well in screenshots is that the default camera is continuously "popping" through the wall or the support beams in the ceiling above. If you try to zoom in to compensate for the small room, you wind up with only the very tip of your avatar's head onscreen, and you still have issues with the ceiling. These issues are entirely absent with the "over the shoulder camera. I was even able to create and navigate a fully furnished recreation of one of my previous real world apartments, where the main room was only about 6mx6m with a 2.5m high ceiling. Here is a link to a Jira entry requesting this change.

Dresden Ceriano wrote: Hiro Pendragon wrote: 3. Widespread ridicule of tall avatars. (Kidding. .... sort of...) Lol... Phrased a little differently, sure. I've heard a lot about people being ridiculed for being too short and it's easy to see why some would be inclined to ridicule right back. But just informing someone that you are of appropriate scale without getting defensive about it, would do a lot of good. This. I've never been a fan of harassing, mocking, or otherwise getting snarky ("I'm normal, why aren't you?") with other avatars just because they're giant sized. We see the results of that in this thread from a couple of posters where baggage from those kinds of experiences confuses the issue in their minds and makes them more defensive than open to understanding exactly "why" it's an issue. It leads people to focus on the "realistic sizes" (Maybe I don't WANT to be realistic!) while ignoring the impacts on diversity (their ability to be "unrealistic"), the money they pay for land, aqnd our ability to create within SL's limits.

Feel free!

That's right, I completely left out the impact of SL's scale issues on animations! It's not limited to poseballs, either. Almost everyone has, at one time or another, seen an AO animation either leave their avatar floating just off the ground, or sinking into it. Most avatars tend to have extremely bad issues with ground sit poses. I may have to write up additional sections to this article and put them all together on a blog somewhere.

Jo Yardley wrote: Some of SL's best cars are now being sold at a more real size. Actually, glad you rought up vehicles. I wanted to edit my original post to mention this but I've apparently hit the character limit. Years ago Cubey Terra, owner of Abbott's Aerodome, one of the most successful, if not the most successful, maker of aircraft in SL put on an exhibit displaying how scale affected vehicles in SL. Cubey created some small planes users could actually control remotely, with their avatar remaining on the ground. The planes were small enough that the interior of the aerodome became larger than multiple sims combined, from the perspective of those flying the planes. I already pointed that double scaling environments effectively reduces sim sizes to 1/4th, it's worth pointing out that this affects vehicles as well. If you make your car, areoplane or boat double sized, you are reducing size of the sim relative to that vehicle. A 1=1 scale car has four times as much area to drive in as a double scaled car.

Dresden Ceriano wrote: Maybe I should have phrased it differently, what I meant by that question is have you noticed that it's working? Well, in 2005 avatars under 6' were practically unheard of. Most of those who thought they were under 6' were using incorrect scripted height detectors. That's not to say there were no avatars under 6' back then, only that they were extremely rare. Now, it's common. Now there are at least three major RP sims/communities in SL which advocate properly scaled avatars. 1920's Berlin, Doomed Ship and The Wastelands. About a dozen people purchase my camera correcting HUD attachment off of the SL Marketplace every day. Many are also using the even better in-client fix I linked to in my article about scale. Around 2007-2008 nearly every adult sim had rules against avatars under 6' tall, which were enforced with broken height detectors. Now, such sims are extremely rare. Pretty much every third party SL viewer displays avatar height in the appearance editor. It's become a standard feature. LL added this to the official viewer as of SL 2.1, tho LL's version is broken. I do agree that this problem would be best solved by LL themselves. Look at the number of accounts you see these days without the old username surnames. Imagine of all those .resident accounts began with properly scaled starter avatars, an appearance editor that wasn't broken and had camera placement that was not an obsolete leftover from late 90's videogames. That is also why I posted this in the content creation forums, so more content creators, seeing the benefits, would put additional pressure on LL to make changes that should have been made long ago. So, yes, feel free to bring this up at user group meetings.