giant avatars—a tutorial
how to oversize the regular second-life avatar mesh in 13 steps
 

 
A lot of people in "↑Second Life" (SL) are craving for larger-than-life avatars, but the sliders of the appearance menu only do allow body sizes within 'human limits'. You may have seen large furries or robots (like Detect's ↵Kravatac), but those are constructions out of attached prims, completely hiding the avatar itself inside, and equipped with an animation override, containing a new set of animations for the huge figure. This strategy is a workaround, as the size of the avatar's character mesh is not changed beyond the set limits. But then there are ↑rumours, like: "Due to a bug in the current code of Secondlife it is possible to generate avatars of huge size if you know how to do it. [...] Enjoy the pics and no I’m not telling how to do it." ... Thank you very much :-(
 
As I was fascinated by this possibilities, I did some research. Obviously, if the phenomenon really existed, it had to be a bug exploit maybe similar to the one resulting in mega prims. I'm not much of a coder, and gave the thing up. Then, about a year ago, I saw some work in progress on a website. There it was attempted to trick the appearance and building interface of SL, in order to achieve the desired huge avatars. As no working solution was provided, I forgot about the matter. Till recently. A random guy in a chatroom could not keep his big mouth shut, but was reluctant to give precise information, when asked directly. I dug in my files and went back to said website. Unfortunately meanwhile it seems to have been taken offline, and the Internet archive does not have a copy.
 
But now I was farely sure that the effect really existed, and worked on from the information I saved to my HDD back then. After much trial and error and a good deal of frustration I finally succeeded :-) There is no coding required, no scripts are needed, as the method indeed cleverly tricks both the building and appearance feature. It is not hard to do—clean sculpties are way harder, but a bit of patience is needed, though, because absolute precision is required! As an open-source follower, I will exactly tell you how to do it, step by step:
 

 
1) You need a single frame animation, forcing the avatar into default position, meaning having every joint of the bone rig at a rotation of exactly zero degrees. You can make an according animation in e.g. QAvimator [right side of the above picture], import it into SL, and then play it 'in world' (do not play it 'locally,' as then the process to follow will not work—locally means that the animation is only visible on your screen, as your client [the SL 'viewer'] won't relay the data to the server, but we have to alter the server data). Many posing stands already feature the required stance, so you can use one of those instead, and it is easier to position the av precisely on the grid. In case you are using a posing stand you have not made yourself, have to make absolutely sure, a) that the av poses exactly above the stand's center, b) that the pose really is the default stance, and c) that the hand morph, at both hands, is forced to the awkward 'splayed fingers' pose. The face morph does not matter, it can be any.
 

 
2) Assuming that you are using a posing stand, rezz it inworld. Then move it to an integer grid intersection, e.g. at 30,45,430 in my example— that way it will be easier to exactly align the final, and crucial, piece later on. Get your av on the posing stand.
 
3) Go into 'building mode' and rezz a cylinder. make it 1 meter large in the z-dimension, 0.1 meters in x- and y-dimensions. Right click the cylinder and 'take' it. Make four copies of the cylinder inside the inventory. Right click one of the cylinders in your 'inventory' and attach it to the right hand. Right click one of the copies and attach it to the left hand.
 
4) Right click on the cylinder attached to your right hand and click 'edit'. If it is not vertical yet, rotate it, so that it is exactly vertical. Use the degree scales for this. Move the cylinder downward in z-direction for 0.9 meters. Rotate the cylinder inward, to the body's centre exactly 45 degrees. Rotate the cylinder forward exactly 30 degrees, so that the upper end of it is still inside the hand, the lower end in front of the av's body. (We have to do that, because, except at the hands and feet, the parts of the 'stretching rig' must not be 'inside' your avatar!) Right click the attached cylinder and 'detach' it. (Now the positioning you have done is stored.) Right click the cylinder in the inventory and this time do not click 'attach,' but 'wear'. It should appear in exactly the same position on your hand as before.
 

 
5) Repeat the process for the cylinder attached to the left hand, so it is positioned exactly mirrored to the first cylinder.
 
6) Right click the next cylinder-copy in your inventory and attach it to the right foot. Make it vertical and move it upwards 0.9 metres. Untick 'stretch both sides', hold down ctrl+shift, and elongate the cylinder upwards until its upper end is on the same level as the lower ends of the cylinders attached to the hands. I can not give an exact figure here, as your av may be of a different size as mine, but that won't cause problems. 'Detach' and then 'wear'.
 
7) Repeat the process for the left foot, but do not stretch it by mouse movement! Instead look at the size of the right foot cylinder in the object tab of the building menu. Make the 'left-foot cylinder' exactly the same size. Look at the z-coordinate of the 'right-foot cylinder' and type in the exact same value for the 'left-foot cylinder'. 'Detach' and then 'wear'.
 
8) Left click the last copy of the cylinder and draw it in front of your avatar. Do not make a new cylinder for this! All cylinders have to be copies of each other—do not ask me why, as I have no idea.
 
9) Do not move it with the mouse, but use the coordinates given in the 'object' tab of the building menu, in order to assure absolute accuracy. Compare the xyz-coordinates of your 'feet cylinders' to those of the last cylinder and align the latter exactly in the middle of them, and rotate it exactly horicontal, so that it 'goes through' both 'feet cylinders'. Now you know why we placed the posing stand on an integer grid-intersection firsthand.
 
10) Now 'stretch both sides' has to be ticked in the building menu. Shrink the horicontal cylinder horicontally by mouse movement (see above) until its ends are completely hidden inside the vertical 'feet cylinders'.
 
11) Now again absolute precision is required. Look at the vertical size of the feet cylinder. Divide that size by two and add it to the horicontal cylinder's position z-value. That way the horicontal cylinder is moved upwards so that its center axis is exactly flush with the ends of the 'feet-cylinders'. This is important!
 
Now your set-up should look like this [note the moody lighting I added for drama just before the 'hard part' ;-]:
 

 
12) Hold down 'shift' and click all five cylinders, one at a time, making sure that you click the horicontal cylinder as the last one. Go to the 'tools' menu and click 'link'. SL may not allow this to you immediately, because we are mixing attached and none-attached prims, which have a different status for the server. In that case, leave posing stand and horicontal cylinder in place, log out, then relog, and try again. Only once I had to relog twice until the server complied:
 

 
Now comes the glorious finale:
 
13) When editing an item consisting out of several linked prims, you can not resize it in one dimension only—but you can resize the whole item! Right click your linked prims, select edit, hold down ctrl+shift, position your mouse pointer over one of the grey resizing cubes appearing at the corners of the whole construction's bounding box, left click and hold, then draw outwards as far as possible. It is pure magic, when you first see it, believe me. Along with the cylinder-rig, your avatar gets larger proportionally! Because a prim within SL can not be stretched larger than 10 metres in any dimension, this resizing has a limit. But ...
 
Once succesful, I have built another 'stretching rig'. This time I made the first cylinder not one cylinder, but consisting of ten linked cylinders, each 0.1 metres in length. The stretching process was accompanied by tremendous lag, but it was succesful. Unfortunately the Sim crashed a second later, before I was able to take a screenshot—but I will do more experiments.
 
There is yet one goodie left, I have to tell you about:
 
The invisible man of H. G. Wells' famous novel had to cope with a central problem: He had discovered how to make the human body invisible, but he couldn't make clothing invisible. So, whenever he wanted to run around completely unseen, he had to go bare-naked. I already feared that a similar phenomenon would spoil the oversized SL-avatar. But, as the clothes are texture layers of the character mesh, we don't run into the inconvenience of having to be naked. But it worked out even better. Everything attached to the avatar during the stretching process gets enlarged proportionally , too! Compare my prim boots in the picture at the top of this entry to the house on the left—they are almost as high as the complete ground floor. Unfortunately once you detach an item from the avatar it 'snaps back' to regular size. Hence this can't be used as a new way of producing mega-prims.
 
Try it and have fun! If it does not work for you, go through the tutorial step by step again, and make sure that you did everything exactly as described. If it still does not work for you, feel free to e-mail me (e-mail address in the sidebar to the right), or IM me (Zephyrin Raymaker) inworld and I will help out.