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::