minetest proportions
while reading a blog post from LazyJ (link), one of his statements caught my attention, as a Minetest builder myself. here, I'll quote the full thing:
Perspective and Proportion
One of the challenges of building in Minetest is interpreting your perspective and sense of proportion of the real world and translating that into the perspective and proportions of Minetest worlds.
In Minetest everything is based on the dimension of 1 x 1 x 1 cubical space. Even the smallest, thinnest panel occupies a full 1 x 1 x 1 cubical space -- nothing else can occupy that space at the same time.
This can be useful in some build-design tricks but more often than not it is a frustrating fact of builing in Minetest that you can't put stuff close together like you can in real life.
To work around this means having to make compromises and sacrifices in how you assemble your builds and then relying on the viewers' imagination to fill in where Minetest won't allow stuff to be put.
To build in Minetest with real life proportions would result in creations so massive that Minetest wouldn't be able to load all of the world chunks for viewing at a distance. The Minetest character would be like a tiny ant in a pro-sports stadium.
To help adjust your perspective from the real world to a Minetest world and give you a better sense of proportion of your build to the player character stack two blocks, one on top of the other, to create a mannequin. Two blocks high is roughly the height and width of a Minetest character ("Sam"). Since the default "Sam" has blue pants and a green shirt, I stack a green wool block on top of a blue wool block. Then I place one of these wool mannequins in each room and at least one outside to get a better feel for how big or small to make stuff.
I like the idea of thinking of nodes as of occupying 1x1x1 cubical space and not cubical meters, as it is popularly thought. I've highlighted the portions I'm referring to in bold.
using cubical meters to align the Minetest world with the real one has its own quirks. while it does eliminate the issue of unrealistic proportions relatively to the character ("a tiny ant in a pro-sports stadium": love that quote), it introduces another issue, which is that "you can't put stuff close together like you can in real life".
using cubical spaces and its limitations was already discussed in that blog post, let's focus on centering the proportions based on a human body (or, a Minetest character, Sam). now, it's not really different from usign cubical meters, as the character is thought to replicate the male human body already, but it does poorly, as 2 meters is high above the average male human height. thus, we are kind of making 2 blocks tall equal to ~170 cm, or 1.7 meters. if we could assume Sam is female, it would be equal to ~160 cm, or 1.6 meters, which is not that far off, but still presents a difference. but we shouldn't forget the author's idea is not to mathematically base all the proportions off of this data I've just approximated, but to use that as a reference to "get a better feel for how big or small to make stuff", which I think is a fair point.
so, there you have it. 3 ways to convert real life proportions into Minetest proportions, only 1 of which is mathematical (which is the cubic meters one, and in my opinion it is the most boring; I've tried to use it, it is just ugh).
this blog post does not introduce an opinion on this really, it's more of a commentary on the LazyJ's blog post I've linked in the beginning, more specifically on the Minetest proportions. but I hope you've liked it <3