Character Model Reference Sizes

If you're trying to make 3D character models from scratch it is helpful to know the actual dimensions of real humans.  One of the best resources for this information that I've found are the dimensions for the Alvanon Forms.

Alvanon is a company that makes and sells dress forms (aka "dressmaker's dummies") for the fashion and apparel industries.  They also do extensive research on the dimensions of actual human beings, both adults and children, all around the world.  They do sell 3D model services, but they are very expensive and geared exclusively toward their target industries.  In other words, you can't buy one of their standard male or female models to use as a posing dummy in Clip Studio Paint or as a base in your 3D modeling software.

But they do have a massive amount of data on human dimensions you can use as a starting point.  On their website there are PDF product data sheets for each of their many dress forms:

https://alvanon.com/resources/alvaform-manual/

If you go to the last page of each of those product data sheets you'll find all the dimensions for the dress forms in both inches and centimeters in a chart like this:

You can glean the dimensions you need from there.  In this sample it is for six men's UK clothing sizes, but what are useful are measurements such as the Total Height, Inseam, Across Shoulder, etc.

Of course it's helpful to know how they arrive at those measurements so you'll also want to check out the Measurement Specifications documents:

https://alvanon.com/resources/alvaform-measurements-specs/

Which have useful charts like this inside:

Universities are also doing this kind of work for other industries.  For example, here is a 2018 survey published by the University of Malaysia Engineering Department which gathered anthropometric data on Malaysian, Thai, Filipino, and Indonesian men and women:

https://www.ias.ac.in/article/fulltext/sadh/043/01/0010 (PDF file)

I took a bunch of data from various sources (including the CDC, EU, the Malaysian survey mentioned above, an architectural design website, etc.) and put it all in a spreadsheet to get these "Average Human" dimensions:

           AVERAGE HUMAN DIMENSIONS
================================================
                   MALE     FEMALE    AVERAGE

HEIGHT             1715mm   1588mm    1651mm
EYE HEIGHT         1599mm   1478mm    1538mm
SHOULDER HEIGHT    1411mm   1302mm    1357mm
SHOULDER BREADTH    418mm    382mm     400mm
ELBOW HEIGHT       1072mm    991mm    1032mm
HAND LENGTH         189mm    174mm     181mm
HAND BREADTH         77mm     76mm      76mm
REACH UPWARDS      1724mm   1540mm    1632mm
LOW HIP WIDTH       376mm    382mm     379mm
WEIGHT               77kg   62.5kg    69.7kg
------------------------------------------------

The data sets were based on the geographic location of wherever the particular study was being done, with no break-down by race or ethnicity, just male and female.  So it's probably not as globally encompassing as it could be.

In addition to the apparel and fashion industries, knowing these numbers could be useful to engineers, architects, furniture designers, industrial designers, and probably video game, 3D animation, and other artists who work with or from 3D character models.