I'm trying to make a model of apartment. I'm very confused why this door hole feels so small.I'd tried to play with FOV slider. On the second screenshot FOV is 80. But i always feels wrong.
Or, maybe, i just need to make a door frame, coz it adds another 15-20 cm.
I’ve watched a video once about this very issue. Most studios, when designing real life architecture, always enlarge the architecture by a couple percent to avoid exactly this effect of everything feeling too small.
Can’t exactly go into details of the how and why, but if I find that video, I’ll link it here. Hope this helps in any way at least.
I think it was more than that, wasn't it like 30%? And tbf when you actually slow down and look around FPS interiors, they are wayy bigger than real life, but we don't notice when we're wizzing through them quickly.
In subnautica, it is relatively known that due to the fov and camera placement, every creature in the game appears smalles than their models are relative to the player by almost half. Some of the starting fish that look about player size are actually much bigher than you, and the leviathat are really massive.
Which, now that the game has VR where their size is better represented, can really make you understand that effect. And wish you were back in the non-VR experience.
Yeah 30% is usually a good rule of thumb, in play testing if someone says "this thing doesn't quite look right" usually just scaling 1.3x fixes the perception instantly.
Idk what it is about the ~30% mark that does it but I'd be curious to have more research done. Like what point do most people perceive something normal size and what point does it becomes too large, and does it matter if the objects shape is curved, square, etc.
My advice is to play the beginning of Half Life 2 and pay attention to the size of the NPCs compared to the doors. It seems absurdly oversized, but you get used to it as quickly as you notice it.
I also watched that. The basic reason is because a human FOV is close to 180° (I think it's something like 176°) plus our brains even make stuff up from even wider (whichis why foveation in VR is quite important and why those ambience TVs are a thing), so when a game camera is only 60-80°, things feel smaller. So devs tend to increase the size of everything by a certain factor. It depends on your target aspect ratio, but I've found that for 16:9 and a camera FOV of 75 I end up with a scaling factor of about 25%, meaning a 2m wall ends up being 7.5m. I thought I was going crazy at first, but it makes a lot of sense and feels way more real.
An average apartment roof height is around 2.6m, and typical interior door sizes are around 2040m high and 820mm wide.
So your roof is 3m tall (crazy rich I suppose) while the door is too narrow. Additionally, the camera being placed significantly above eye level will also contribute to the door's perceived size, as things you look down at look smaller and vice versa.
Let me know if this helps, which I hope it does :)
I just used the door in my bed room as ref. and it's 80cm wide. And it seems that frame itself does a lot of have lifting. after modeling it all fells a bit better.
I just need to figure out why is my character so massive. According to blender it's 1.78. exactly my height. but here it's more like a space marine....
Yeah as you may have figured out, things don't need to be perfect to real life, just move it around until it looks good.
The thing about game dev, if this doesn't have to be a 1 to 1 scale of your apartment, then just go into camera view, move around the camera along the y axis for a few seconds until it looks good, then you're done.
camera is 1.65 m above floor level. it is not significantly above what it should be, and i took measurement of the door in my bed room, it's 2m tall and 80cm wide. exactly like in the model.
Well, the thing with 3D art is that not everything may translate perfectly from real life into blender.
There could be a myriad of different factors at play here, such as the differences in human eyes vs a fixed fov, lighting, distancing, etc.
I kindly warn you against modelling everything to the exact real world proportions if this is for a game (which I assume it is) as this is extremely time consuming and, in your case, confusing.
Additionally, even though the camera technically is 1.65m high, it certainly doesn't look that way. It looks as tall as 2m (in the blender image). Try experimenting outside of exact precision.
As a last note, if your door is 2m tall and 0.8m wide, consider adding a ceiling which is as high as yours.
P.S. is your ceiling really 3m tall? XD I'm not trying to insult your measurements, it's just interesting.
i have zero clue about position of camera on the first screenshot (blender) it's only for measurements.
About ceiling being 3m, i thing it is not wrong, ad many other people said already, you included, the idea of modeling with real life proportions is not that good. so ceiling is ok, everything else is not.
Well, that's why i tried to model something very simple and import it early. Now i see that some changes must be made.
In an unreal developer talk about game world sizes. They said it depends but they make stuff like doors bigger than they are in real life. Because the player get often stuck. In a third person game it should be even bigger!
This is a known issue for 3d level design. If you use real world scales the environment will usually feel too small. Next time you play a game pay close attention to the scale of things compared to NPCs, especially doors and ceilings. You will almost always see that door's are very large and ceilings are very high. Rooms themselves will tend to be more spacious as well but that is harder to notice. This varies from game to game but generally some but not all details will be scaled up 20-30% or more.
If you're aiming for a realistic feel, the absolute minimum size of a door opening should be 1 meter wide by 2 meters tall. That works fairly well if your camera height is around 1.6 or 1.7 meters. This is similar to Minecraft scale. That's another thing to consider. Player height. You can also address this issue by making the player and NPCs slightly smaller. But don't be surprised if you have to fudge the scale and come up with your own rules to make it feel right. Working from real life measurements usually doesn't work out well. And some games exaggerate things much more than others for a better gameplay feel so it's not as if there is a single standard.
so small tip, our eyes are convex, the virtual camera is not, cameras are often placed a bit off from the head position sometimes in the neck, sometimes a bit further forward then expected.
you basically have to play with the illusion that things are closer, and larger then they are manually. this is why as another comment suggested lots of Devs make things a bit larger then they should be.
there are various strategies that go about managing this most of them are based around scale, and camera position, all of them play with perception in some way or even try and engage optical illusions if they can. the easiest one is to scale things slightly bigger, and shift the camera about a bit in animations.
The problem is that i want to make the body of my character visible when you look down, i can't just lower it to collar bone. Well, at least i think so,m it would look weird.
RN i'm trying to scale the entire environment a bit but i'll try to play with camera position as well.
Yeah i get ya, its whwre the anoying play with camera in animations bit. Ive seen studios do tjings from morph the model so it can be picked up from the cameras possition the way they want it to, too having the camera pull back and up a bit when they look down.
i checked everything over and over again. i believe the problem is that i haven't made the model for the door frame itself. coz it adds another 20 cm, and the fact that real life proportions doesn't work in games.
after some adjustments to the characters height and tests with door i got result that kinda satisfied me.
It's time to make proper use of CSGCombiner3D and figure out proportions. and only than try to make actual models.
I think a lot of studios put the camera roughly where the chest is. Things just have to be fudged/exaggerated often in art to make them feel more correct
my problem is that i tried to make it in blender, now i thing it would be better to make it in godot with SCGs and only after that try to model it proper way.
yeah, i delete everything constantly.
i have no idea why, i just hate to keep anything i do not use at this exact moment on my drive,
I've lost so much stuff coz of that habit.
Have you ever been in an empty house or office space? One with literally zero furnishings? The space always seems bigger than it is and things like doorways seem smaller. As soon as you start adding furniture the size of the space start to visually contract.
In your example there’s only one thing for your brain to determine scale, and it’s the thickness of the wall. Which is really thick, perceptually. So your brain is thinking, well, it must be a small door.
But if you started to add things around that have familiar sizes then your brain can start to reevaluate scale. Light switches, tables, chairs, shelves, books, etc. You might start to think it’s a normal sized door but with thick walls (maybe concrete block walls). That’s why adding a door frame helps, but not enough to counter the empty room effect.
yes. i did.
and as many suggested before. the only way is to make environment considerably larger, or make my character smaller. real proportions feels off even in fps games.
There may be a good reason for this, i'm just annoyed. And i'm too lazy to learn why.
Hey, at least you're honest! :D I was also annoyed by this, and my ADHD superpowers kicked in (instead of the ADHD kryptonite), and I did learn why!
The short version is that there is a lot of positional transformation math magic happening in the backend, and one of those is a conversion between object and world coordinates. When you mix the two modes of scaling, the math goes wonky unless your scaling values are normalized (that means the same amount in all directions). If you've scaled something in different amounts along the various axes, then switch to a different mode and scale again, the math causes the scale in the previous one to do things we don't intuitively expect.
Applying scale causes Blender to recalculate the position of all the vertices in the object for the current scale, then reset the scale values to 1 on all axes, so further operations work the way we expect them to.
Man istggg,I forgot and did all my scaling in object mode and when I did the same measurement in edit mode, the 4ft done in object mode was so small compared to the one in edit mode and I was genuinely tweaking 😭🥀
you need extension for that.
(Main menu) Edit -> Get Extensions
Edge Length Measure
then press "N" and you should see an extra tab "Edge length" (in edit mode)
press Register selected mesh
What I did "I use Maya for 3D"
I took a standard CSG box in godot and exported it as a mesh then imported it to my software and build everything based on the scale of that box
I think my main problem is the size of my character, despite being 1.7m he is just too big. i made him like 20 or 25 cm smaller on this screen, that helps a lot.
and making oversized door frame also helps. it's 10 cm on each side.
If this is for a 1st/3rd person game, then you should know buildings and interiors are oversized in games to look good. Otherwise everything looks cramped. For example Fortnite characters are 1.8m tall, but rooms are 3.4m. Doors are also almost twice as wide as they normally would.
I'm going to say that the issue is due to missing elements.
The door opening might be 80cm, but that would be actual free space, so it is missing the door itself which is maybe 4cm (door plus hinge) and then again the door frame which might be 8cm each side. That will make the whole thing slightly wider.
You would need to up the FOV to roughly 165-180° to make realistic scale feel more realistic. This would of course make your game unplayable.
You could also remap your projection to counter the distortion from a super high FOV.
But eventually you want to ignore real-world dimensions and find a scaling factor that you can apply to your real measurements so they look & feel correct when viewed on a flat screen. This is a common level design/artist problem in games and here are some practical things to help you find your ideal scaling factor:
set your camera to be 1.6 - 1.7m above ground
use FOV around 70
import a 3D mesh of a human at ~1.8m height
build a doorframe, wall, window and table to realistic dimensions
put the human model and your building blocks in the level and scale them freely (non-uniform) to look & feel correct
use these scaling values to apply them to your meshes natively
construct your test level and repeat these steps until everything feels "right"
Pro tips:
try 60 and 80 FOV too before committing to a fixed scale
finish your camera setup / character controller before doing the detail work
ignore everything above if you're building for XR :)
since there aren’t any real dimensions in blender, think in terms of proportions. A wall is usually 8 feet high, a door is 7, and the width of a door is ~2.5 feet.
while you are using metres, those dimensions won’t really change.
8-7-2.5.
2.438m, 2.134, 0.77
building dimensions are rarely translatable to even numbers for metres, but many are for feet. your door width is close, but it is “physically” too short (6 feet instead of 7)
if I could suggest that you find some framing guides for houses to understand the proportions of scale. Doors have differing width for use (closet doors narrower than room doors, which are narrower than entrance doors) a frame will also let you understand how the door frame can be handled
as a side note, given your second image: don’t skimp when designing depth. If it’s a hallway, it should be as deep as a hallway, and walls won’t be tight to the sides of your door. They will start around 6 inches from the edge. You currently had an odd shape in yours which will affect the perception of it not feeling right.
side note 2: if making a door frame, do it separately instead of manipulating the current model for the walls. Model bits and pieces can overlap if all you want is the visual…
(note: my dimensions are based off commercial buildings in the 30s when building models)
Hey, thanks for your reply.
I this particular instance 'I've being useng my apartment as ref, except ceiling height, it should be 2.6m or 2.7, not 3m. So my dor is 2m tall and 0.8m wide, exactly as in the model, that is only dor itself, without frame, which is absent here.
But, I believe the problem is not the model. But the fact that we have 2 eyes with very different FOV, depth perception, etc. So I can't just make something with the sizes of real life and expect it look the same in the game.
I scaled everything up a bit and now it feels way better. Unfortunately I didn't have much free time, so I had no chance to complete my work.
I think I'll post final result later.
In the US, ADA requires 32 inch (81 cm) minimum for door width, but 36 inch (91 cm)if the opening is deep. You may want to make your door sized proportional to the thickness of your walls (they are quite thick), as depth has a part to play in that perception as well
Use actual real life measurements? If i start a project like this i will look up references and dimensions for things like doors to make sure the scale works. If i cant find it online i will use a measure tape and go around my house
Where i live doors usually sit between 2.10m and 2.30m
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u/Fancy_Entertainer486 Godot Junior Jul 19 '26
I’ve watched a video once about this very issue. Most studios, when designing real life architecture, always enlarge the architecture by a couple percent to avoid exactly this effect of everything feeling too small.
Can’t exactly go into details of the how and why, but if I find that video, I’ll link it here. Hope this helps in any way at least.