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Body Shapes and Proportion

I've been tinkering with my shape. Again. I'm not sure why, but I've spent a ridiculous amount of time tweaking sliders. Do other people do this? I dunno.

Anyway, one thing that has bugged me for a very long time about SL is how hard it is to create a good looking avatar. A lot of the difficulty comes from the way that the SL interface is designed, but it's also due to the limitations of the model that SL uses as well as how the 3D engine renders that model. I'm not saying Linden Labs did a bad job, because 3D modeling is complex. They did make choices, however, and not all of those choices were to optimize the user experience.

One of the first choices that becomes apparent is that the "default" avatar is SL's own stylization of a human figure. Legs and bodies tend to be taller in relation to the head, and prominent facial features like the eyes and chin are exaggerated. This isn't unusual in video games or virtual spaces, where designers are allowed to create any shape they want as the base, accentuating the features they feel are important for their platform.

SL gives us bodies which are roughly 8 heads tall or more. By contrast, basic drawing anatomy teaches us that humans are typically 7.5 heads tall. Numerically that may not seem like a huge difference, but the result is that Second Life avatars tend to display proportions similar to comic book heroes or fashion design. In a virtual world where you can be anything, we all want to be beautiful.

Which got me wondering if it was even possible to create a realistically proportional SL avatar and not have  it look weird. Here's what I came up with, alongside the default SL body and SL's Senra body.


"Realistic" Default SL Senra

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