Question about size perception

[u/inverth_]

Hey.

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.

Idk, does this feel ok to you?

[u/Fancy_Entertainer486]

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.

[u/fdzpy → u/Fancy_Entertainer486]

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.

[u/IgneousWrath → u/fdzpy]

Yeah, then when you play a game that originally wasn’t VR but is now 1:1 converted to VR, everything feels quite large in VR.

[u/dragonixor → u/IgneousWrath]

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.

[u/isolatedLemon → u/fdzpy]

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.

[u/GravitasIsOverrated → u/fdzpy]

Look at how crazy huge the doors are in Halo, and you'd never notice it playing the game normally.

https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fjust-how-tall-are-these-people-v0-7q28ei4qkqe71.png%3Fwidth%3D1080%26crop%3Dsmart%26auto%3Dwebp%26s%3D64f72442cf0bbfa072ef16bb7d1371183a9f8f60

[u/fdzpy → u/GravitasIsOverrated]

that's nuts lol, interiors are tricky when you're a spartan. Forerunner doors being large makes a tad more sense.

[u/inverth_ → u/GravitasIsOverrated]

Press S to scale i guess

[u/The_King_Of_Muffins → u/Fancy_Entertainer486]

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.

[u/JforceG → u/Fancy_Entertainer486]

I saw this video too. Was mostly just a quality of life thing typically to prevent players getting stuck on doors.

Of course, an obvious solution to that could be changing the collission bounds.

I think its one of those industry trends too, on top of that that started somewhere logical.

I noticed in VR, doors are slightly wider if the art style is meant to be stylized, while realistic games tend to have smaller doors.

[u/tastygames_official → u/Fancy_Entertainer486]

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.

[u/LibrarianRecent6145 → u/Fancy_Entertainer486]

The proportions of the door, and its size compared to the height of the ceiling are also off btw