Has anybody been able to use the taper dial in a meaningful way? I've been using Poser for about a year now, and have found that the only somewhat useful dials for affecting changes in body proportion are the scale dials. And even those can only be tweaked slightly before body parts are out of whack. What purpose does the taper dial serve? Anybody have images that illustrate its successful use?

Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=819348

Check the link to the Poser Technical forum to see the sort of crazy stuff we Poser loonies get up to. :-) On a more practical note, I often use it on a figure's shins to get a better fit with boots

Thanks for the link to that previous message EG!! Looks like a fun project. :) Irene

I like it for making a subtle variety in head shapes. The right taper can really add to a head. IMHO Rawnrr

I find the taper dial to be the most useful of all the parameters in fitting clothing.

Me too. P4 woman's boots? Taper 1% on shin every time.

Taper is very good for creating monsters and aliens where clothing and hair fit aren't an issue.

Slight increments can help make a head morph more realistic.

Only way to get jeans to fit inside boots like this.

Hmmm... interesting. I've been making furniture and have removed the taper dial from every single body part in every figure. With (many) non-organic objects, it's worse than useless... it's downright dangerous. No doubt 100s of people will tell me this isn't true, and I'm sure it's useful with SOME non-organic objects, but certainly not the ones I make. mac

I've always found the taper to cause more problems than it solves. I gave it up long ago. Mind you, I've never yet had to tuck jeans into boots.... :] Fish

heyas; scaling and tapering can be hazardous to your (mental) health. they don't always work right, and they don't always work well. i also use taper when i use propagating scale on hands. when you use propagating scale, you get a sharp jump in scale, so you need to taper the parent body part. now, sometimes when creating a figure, i notice that nudging the taper dial up a little causes a big ballooning jump in the mesh, which renders it about useless for anything but making ugly deformations. to this date, i still have no clue why it sometimes does that. ::sigh::

I use taper often... but only a smidgen of it. Sort of like cooking with paprika or rosemary where you need an effect but don't want to destroy the dish.

Boots, gloves, getting a closer fit on sleeves, fitting things into things...

Changing the shape of the head, changing subtle variations in the chest/shoulders/neck/waist... As for scaling, just remember to set dials close at hand on about the same level. The image is Vicki3 HEAVILY scaled for a comission, wearing some milgirl clothes. As you can see, the arms join very strange where the collar/shoulder joint is. But that's because the y scale isn't set corrispondingly.

Now. Same character, about 10 minutes later, after hiding the dress completely and working on the scaling more carefully. She's got some issues at the bottom of the collar, now, but since that's completely covered up anyway, it doesn't matter. Her arms, you see, are fixed. The shoulder joint is weird, in that both the Y and X scales need to be moved for the desired affect. >.

I also find I sometimes need a smige of taper, often less than the 1% it seems to want to start with. If so, I'll export an .obj with 2% and bring it back in as a new MT.