horse measurements tutorial
I've had a lot of people ask me how to standardize horse heights with the release of my size slider. While this is by no means the one and only way to measure your horse, it is fairly reliable within half a hand or so, depending on how accurate you are with your horse's stance and the OMSP. This is the way that Paragon Farm horses will be measured, if you want to know the accurate height of one of our sale horses or breeding stallions.
SUPPLIES
- A horse
- Horse size slider (available here)
- Granthes' OMSP (here)
- Flat, level ground
- (not required) Pose player and a neutral standing horse pose
- Height conversion chart found here
measuring
Find a patch of flat, level ground. If you're not sure if the ground is level, take the horse inside the barn or level it with the terrain tool. Either wait for the horse to be standing level or apply a pose, then go into build/buy mode and select your OMSP (under deco -> misc). Place the OMSP below the horse's chest and ctrl+shift+click on it. Bump it up as necessary, trying to get the platform of the OMSP level to the horse's withers. Since sim horses have horribly defined withers, I usually set mine a little further down than you would on a RL horse because otherwise you're actually just measuring the neck. Don't worry about keeping track of how high you're going, that's the next step! Ctrl+shift+click the OMSP again once you've got your desired height and select "Report Height." A dialog box will pop up on the top right telling you how high your OMSP is in meters. As you can see, Sly here is 1.6m. Find that height in the right column of the height conversions link found at the top of the page (or here, lazy people) and voila! You have your height. Sly is about 15.3hh, which is about right since he's still got a little growing to do. |
notes and fun facts!
- The way we display hands when referring to horses is a hands.inches format. Since there are four inches in each hand, the decimal places only go up to three. Fourteen and a half hands is not 14.5, but 14.2hh. For more information and a better explanation, see this link.
- It is perfectly normal for a horse to vary between 1-2 inches depending on when they are measured and horses (particularly large Warmblood and Draft breeds) may continue growing as old as 5 or 6 years of age. Do not be alarmed if a horse is advertised as 16.1 using this method and you measure them at 16.3. Allow up to a hand of error due to differences in stance or interpretation of the height of withers.
- Normal "flat" (not padded, correctional, or stacked) shoes typically add about an inch in height and, in most show associations in the US, ponies are allowed to be measured (or "sticked") as high as 14.3 1/2 on show day without shoes. Ponies showing in Large Pony USEF divisions are notorious for actually being horses by height definition--many owners file the horse's hooves down as low as possible without injuring the frog so they can reach 14.2hh for their official measuring and their permanent pony card.