How Tall Are The IMVU Avatars?

Original Avatars

The original avatars for IMVU were made in 3DS Max 20 years ago without any particular heed to real world scaling. This meant that although all the parts are proportioned relative to the original ‘bobblehead’ toon styling, their height doesn’t bare any resemblance to reality so, opened into 3DS Max, the original IMVU avatar references stand approximately 1150 metres tall from their point of origin.

Design note: IMVU Studio Toolkit tutorials (poses, clothing, furniture, accessories, rooms etc.).

Toolkit Avatars

With the introduction of IMVU’s Toolkit for Studio, the avatar references have been adjusted and, while still relatively large, are scaled in proportion to IMVU itself, which otherwise rescales assets during import to match the system. Compared to the original raw avatar assets, in the Toolkit avatars stand approximately 11.5 metres tall from their root.

Important: DO NOT rescale or alter the avatars beyond their functionality as described by the tool they belong to as this will break the project on import into IMVU.

The avatars loaded when using the Toolkit for IMVU are scaled relative to correct export, making them around 100x smaller than the original, raw, reference files (do not rescale).

Units of Measurement

The Unit of Measurement for IMVU is metres (meters) – Scene Properties » Units » Units System [1] – but as outlined above, neither avatar stands correctly scaled in relation to that, metres, in any realistic sense. In other words, both male and female avatar are the same height by default, but scaled relative to themselves rather than corresponding to any real world representation of size.

Design note: the average height of an in real-life human male and female varies depending on location; for women it’s roughly between 5′ (Pacific Asia) and 5′ 8″ (Northern Europe), for men it’s between 5′ 5″ (Pacific Asia) and 5′ 10″ (Northern Europe). IMVU does not reflect this difference for sake of optimising the asset pipeline; both avatars use the same underlying skeleton so the same pose, for example, can be used to animation of pose both.

Both avatars are the same size and use the same underlying unit of measurement, metres [1], ensuring the same pose or animation works uniformly between the two.

Content Scale

When making content for IMVU although the base unit of measurement is metres, this should be thought of in relation to a grid or increments that can be snapped to rather than strict units for measuring something. In other works, content should be make using the avatars as the base objects for scaling, the average bed for example, might be built long enough to accommodate the avatar stretching their arms above their heads. Similarly for a doorway, the avatar might stand arms above head holding the framing around said door.

A bed is typically scaled/sized relative to the avatar being able to stretch their arms above their heads and be supported, whereas seating should be scaled relative to the seated avatar (notwithstanding custom avatar poses).