Solving Player Character Heights
TL;DR at the bottom with charts and pictures.
So, the other day there was a post about comparing character heights in the Homestead. And that got me wondering the age-old question of just how tall the player characters actually are. Searching around Reddit and Google, I found a few different charts that suggested various heights, but most of them seemed to be based on conjecture or were reliant on general statements you can find on the wiki from various sources (such as norn being a race of 9ft-tall humanoids). And that just won't do.
So, we can place our characters next to each other. Awesome. But without a reference point, we have no way of actually measuring them. So I started looking around the wiki for any kind of information I could work with. I was hoping to start with a charr, because that's the race I play the most. But I couldn't find canon heights for any charr. Not even Rytlock. So I changed my approach and started looking through notable characters, like Destiny's Edge. Lo and behold, Zojja's wiki page has a note saying that the novel Edge of Destiny declared her to be approximately 3'7".
So, we know how tall Zojja is. Excellent start. But how could we use that knowledge to our advantage? Well, first we needed to locate her. There are two easily-accessible locations for her: the Snaff Memorial Lab (until you complete a certain point in the Personal Story), or the Wizard's Tower (after a certain chapter in SotO). Conveniently, the Snaff Memorial Lab is located in Rata Sum, which is right behind where new asura characters spawn after finishing the tutorial. So that works out best for us.
Now that we knew where Zojja is, the logical conclusion was to make an asura character to match her height. So I made a female asura with the height slider set to the minimum and blitzed through the tutorial. Once an asura makes it to Metrica Province, they're able to turn around and hop into Rata Sum, where they can zip across the city to the asura gate to the Snaff Memorial Lab.
It took me five tries to get the right height, starting from the bottom. A female asura with the height slider set to four ticks from the bottom was the closest match. As a side note, it's very convenient that Zojja is bald, as that means her hair doesn't get in the way of figuring out accurate heights!
With the player asura confirmed as approximately 3'7", I dropped them in the Homestead and swapped to another character. Now to the process of actually figuring out how to most effectively measure other characters. To start out, there's a nice flat platform right by the front door of the main house, so we don't have to worry about elevation differences. I placed the asura on this platform, and then set out a Basic Crate decoration. Using the scaling feature, I was able to make it approximately the same height as the character, and set it down on the platform. I made three more and used the "use previous scale and rotation" button to make them all the same size and align them as a perfect stack of four Basic Crates.
With the stack of crates in place, this was where things started to get tedious. I have three alt accounts, and each of them had four open character slots. I started with the first alt account and made a female asura with the height slider set to the minimum, and brought her into the Homestead. There, I had her stand next to the stack of crates. Fun fact: despite not being able to use lounge passes or your Conjured Door in the tutorial maps, you can teleport to a party member's Homestead through the party context menu.
To cut out half an hour of not getting it right, I learned through trial and error that because player characters stand with one foot more forward than the other, you need to have that forward-most foot as close to the edge of the platform as possible, to match with the position of the Basic Crates. So, after setting up my main account as the cameraman for this project, I had the first alt account bring in the minimum-height female asura I previously mentioned, followed by a maximum-height female asura. After taking the pictures, to make sure I was on the right track, it was time to start doing math.
So, to figure out the height of each character we need to know three things:
- the approximate height of our stack of Basic Crates, in inches
- the height of the stack, in pixels
- the height of the character, in pixels
Assuming each box was correctly measured to our intended 3'7", a stack of four of them would be 172 inches. The top of the stack was luckily placed at the top of the image, and the bottom was at 970. I was using GIMP for this, and it starts counting pixels with 0 rather than 1. This meant that the stack was 971 pixels tall. Using 970 as the base for all measurements going forward, the minimum height asura's height pixel was at 737 and the maximum's was at 693.
Subtracting 737 from 970 gave us 233 pixels for the minimum female asura's height. Next, we take that number and divide it by the result of 971 pixels divided by 172 inches. This comes out to a very long decimal number, and we don't want to round until the very end. So our math for this character looked like:
970px-737px=233px
233px/(971px/172in)=41.27in
This gives us a height for the minimum-height female asura of 41.27 inches, or 3'5.27". Which was a bit concerning, being so close to 3'7" despite being four ticks away. But, I ran the same formula for the maximum-height female asura and came out with 49.07", or 4'1.07".
With our minimum and maximum heights approximated in inches, we now had to mathematically prove that a female asura set four ticks from the bottom of the height slider would be roughly 3'7". To do this, we have to take the maximum (49.07") and subtract the minimum (41.27"). This gave us a difference of 7.80". The height slider has 16 ticks. But for this, we need to divide that 7.80" by 15 ticks, because if you set the slider to minimum, it can increase by 15 ticks. Doing this (7.80in/15) gives us 0.52" per tick. Multiplying this by four gives us 2.08" which, if added to the minimum of 41.27", we get 43.35" or 3'7.35".
And thus, our math works out!
With our numbers proving solid, we're able to progress with the rest of the character options. Here's a chart giving every race and gender combination's minimum and maximum height in pixels and with the converted approximate height. Note that four of the races automatically stand at full height, but the charr stand hunched over, so I felt it important to get a height for charr in both their hunched over stance as well as their full standing height, which you can achieve by using the /crossarms emote.
| Character | Pixels | Height |
|---|---|---|
| Asura F Min | 233 | 3'5.27" |
| Asura F Max | 277 | 4'1.07" |
| Asura M Min | 231 | 3'4.92" |
| Asura M Max | 280 | 4'1.60" |
| Human F Min | 360 | 5'3.77" |
| Human F Max | 438 | 6'5.59" |
| Human M Min | 370 | 5'5.54" |
| Human M Max | 450 | 6'7.71" |
| Sylvari F Min | 361 | 5'3.94" |
| Sylvari F Max | 439 | 6'5.76" |
| Sylvari M Min | 375 | 5'6.43" |
| Sylvari M Max | 455 | 6'8.60" |
| Norn F Min | 462 | 6'9.84" |
| Norn F Max | 558 | 8'2.84" |
| Norn M Min | 503 | 7'5.10" |
| Norn M Max | 612 | 9'0.41" |
| Charr F Min, hunched | 434 | 6'4.88" |
| Charr F Min, straight-backed | 504 | 7'5.28" |
| Charr F Max, hunched | 532 | 7'10.24 |
| Charr F Max, straight-backed | 614 | 9'0.76" |
| Charr M Min, hunched | 444 | 6'6.65" |
| Charr M Min, straight-backed | 511 | 7'6.52" |
| Charr M Max, hunched | 543 | 8'0.19" |
| Charr M Max, straight-backed | 619 | 9'1.65" |
And here's a chart of what each tick would equate out to:
I hope you enjoyed this ridiculous volume of math for something as silly as figuring out the approximate heights of our player characters. And to anyone who actually read through the whole process, thank you. If you find any mistakes in my math, please point it out so we can make everything as accurate as possible!
TL;DR:
I used a character the size of Zojja to measure boxes, and used those to math out the approximate heights of the player characters. Here's a link to all of the images I used to get my numbers for the math.
EDIT: height chart updated to include centimeters and meters. As with the inches, they are rounded to two decimal points.