park life

new house! this one uses the half- or quarter-circle as its theme, along with my typical right angles.

126 prims, 30×38 (fits 4096m land), and L$1700. on sale now.

ever feel like a lilliputian in your sl house? the simple fact is, houses (and lots more) are way out of proportion to what they should be in their real life equivalents. mine included.

much of this is done on purpose, to keep the third-person perspective “camera” tamed. you know, the imaginary camera that follows your av around so you can see what he/she/it is up to. to keep tabs on your wily av the camera has to be in the same room and floor as you. so i make my ceilings quite a bit taller than they would be in a real life building. and to accommodate pleasing proportions, the rooms must be wider.

to give you an idea, a 7-foot ceiling height equates to 2.13 meters. many avs are taller than that and simply wouldn’t be able to enter the room. so right there we need breathing room. add to that other factors: camera, getting up from furniture, and teleporting friends, and i end up using 4.5 - 5 meters for ceiling height. that’s 16 feet, double most reasonable houses. then to make the room look not too tall and square (not to mention leaving our avs enough room to stumble around) and you need at least 10m (32 feet) wide walls for rooms.

but that’s not all it affects. if you place a window at normal height proportionately, avatar heads wouldn’t even be able to reach it. door handles would be too high and stairs would be insurmountable cliffs. so this is when i tune down the scale, and design for the average avatar, realizing it will make the rooms look taller. the other details, such as doors, need to be kept a reasonable height as well. visual elements, such as railings or chair rails, need to be placed in perspective of the avarage avatar. i typically use 1.25m for these.

with big scale rooms it’s easy to make everything big, leaving a poor avatar struggling to reach a window. so do what you have to for allowing fit, but get the details right

i haven’t posted here in a few days, but here is a little summary of what i’ve been up to:

• i started on the new nevi house. progress so far is limited to the platform which will hold it up, which gets it up off the ground a bit. this lets me leave the little stream/pond untouched.
• the little three-prim house for 16m plots is just about done. it’s called “four4″ and i’ll be posting about it soon.
• i started a new house, about 30mx30 which will probably fit on 2048m size plots. and it’s got curves, something new to my style. i’m happy so far but it’s still just a partial shell and will need some time yet. stay tuned for sneak preview pics!