Ok, so, pretty simple thing here. I’ve always built with a 1 foot 1 stud conversion rate when building things from real life. However, there is one thing I’m trying to build where that just doesn’t really look good when I do it 1:1, so what conversations rates do y’all do when building? Thank you in advance.
Edit: I’d still love to hear people’s opinions but I continued building and found that 1.27, albeit an odd number, works fairly well. Just round up or down depending on the decimal and it should work out.
I’ve always stuck to 1:1 (based on character height). Even though it sometimes makes for odd appearances, maintaining the scale will turn it into an aesthetic rather than an issue.
The thing that hurts this strategy the most is that treating 1 stud = 1 foot means your characters are 4 foot wide behemoths with tree trunks for arms and legs. If I’m planning to keep characters as-is, I throw realistic measurements to the wind and just build what seems to look right.
(I realize this isn’t directly related to your question, but your question got me thinking and I had to write down my thoughts on it )
I recently read a book about game design called The Art of Game Design by Jesse Schell (great book). In it, Jesse says that when you’re creating 3d spaces you should proportion things like rooms and furniture differently than the rest of your world. Because of how the player is viewing the game (first person or third person) details like room size, furniture, and objects look off, even if they perfectly match the proportions of the rest of your world. He says if your game is being played in third person, you should increase the size of your rooms and objects slightly. If your game is being played in first person you should decrease the size of your rooms and objects slightly.
One of the games he has worked on is a game called Toontown, and you can see this philosophy throughout the third person Toontown world. You could google things such as “Toontown Estate House” or “Toontown furniture” and find pictures of the furniture and rooms, but it’s an older game and I couldn’t find a great picture showing the contrast between a toon and furniture. Suffice it to say, the furniture and rooms are 1.5x - 2x larger than they should be when you compare them to the toons. Part of this is to add to the cartoony, fun feel of the game, but it’s also to help keep the player from feeling crowded or claustrophobic when they’re moving around the rooms.
Not everything needs to follow the conversions exactly, give them some leeway when needed. Just something to think about.
I have been mainly building from the 1:1 scale as well, but every once and while when I am working something “sticks out” when I go by it, so I just end up redoing it which is bad, but in the end is pretty cool
If I’m trying to build something from real life, I pretend that characters are only the size of a small child. In the end I usually get a pretty cool result, but sometimes things end up WAY too big.
This is sort of one of the reasons I prefer to build with an in game tool, apposed to the studio free fly camera.
F3X is a favorite of mine, as I’m able to scale what looks best relative to my character size / camera orientation.
I prefer not to follow a mathematical way of building, but more of relative scaling depending how it feels.
The average height for a man in the US(where Roblox is based in) is 5’10, or 70 inches. A Robloxian is 5.12 studs tall. So by doing the math, that is a 1 stud:1.39 feet ratio. But unfortunately, we have to account in width which, by simply looking a picture of the Robloxian 1.0, you can tell the proportions are way off. Unless you were going to use a more realistic package, using proper proportions won’t be possible. I don’t think math would be a suffice solution to find proportions. The best thing I would recommend if you are going for realism is to fiddle with it until it looks right. I know that sounds extremely unprofessional, but that is what has worked for me. Otherwise, I agree with going with an approach like ExtremeBuilder mentioned.
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