I spent all list night experimenting with a sudden idea I had for using morphs instead of a separate base figure to make V4 into a child.  The advantage?  Well, the way I see it, if you want to make a juvenile version of a V4 character, you have one of two choices:

1)  Open up Laura, load her morphs, pull up a reference render of your adult character, and spend several hours of trial and error morphing Laura's face so that it resembles the reference shot as much as possible (with allowances made for childlikeness)
2)  Buy a good morph transfer/conversion software package and use it to convert the morph setitngs from Victoria to Laura.

The first option is tedious, the second is probably like a root canal for your wallet.  Here's what I did in a nutshell.  I used standard V4 morphs to narrow the hips and flatten the breasts.  I also widened the waist and shrunk the gluteus slightly.  Then, I made a pair of INJ and REM poses based on the result.  I opened up my V4 character and applied the INJ pose.  Next, I selected "Create Full Body Morph" and named the morph "Pre-Pubescent."  I then applied the REM pose.  In effect, I turned the binary morph pose into a gradable morph (this is useful for creating a young teenager).

The only real inefficiency is that I had to do the same process with the V4 Bodysuit since it doesn't magnetize well to custom morphs.  Beyond that, the "Pre-Pubescent" body morph used in combination with the "Young" head morph, "Head Size" FBM, and figure scaling pretty much did the trick.

This is an example of the result: www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php

There, you see my character, Francesca, at the following ages from right to left: 7, 14, 21. 

The 21-year-old is the unaltered figure. 

The 14-year-old has the pre-pubescent morph set to 0.5 and the "Young" head morph set to 0.3.  She was also scaled to 92% of adult size. 

The 7-year-old had Francesca's body REM pose applied before the pre-pubescent morph was set to 1.  She was then scaled to 73% of adult size, and the "Thin" FBM was set to -0.2 to keep her proportional.  The "Head Size" morph was also set to 0.1, and the "Young" head morph was set to 0.5.

The only thing I'm not sure of is whether or not I need to flatten the breasts a little more on the morph.  The 7-year-old's chest looks perfectly flat (rounded, but not bulging at all) from a 90-degree (i.e. lateral) angle, but from the angle of the sample image, I'm not sure if it looks quite right or not, and if not, if it's a trick of the eye or if she really is a bit more well developed than she should be.

That's one of the reasons I decided to post in the gallery and here asking for honest critique.  So please let me know your thoughts on my procedure, the results, or both.

I think you did a great job with the body sizes.  However, the faces on the 2 younger ones look far too adult.  With the current faces they look more like  Little People / Dwarves than they do children.

Looks good but as Acadia said - the faces need to reflect the ages too.

Interesting idea, but the results look way too adult to me.  At 7, the average girl's chest looks like a boy's.  She should be completely flat.  The breasts the 7-year-old has look like they belong on the 14-year-old, while the 14-year-old looks like an adult to me.

Quote - Interesting idea, but the results look way too adult to me.  At 7, the average girl's chest looks like a boy's.  She should be completely flat.  The breasts the 7-year-old has look like they belong on the 14-year-old, while the 14-year-old looks like an adult to me.

The 14 year old body, enh.  I've seen some fairly developed 14 year olds, so that's a wash.

But agreed, on the seven year old, no breasts at all.  The only time a child that young would have them would be if they are obese, and they'd be identical between boys and girls.

Heads should be larger in proportion to the bodies, especially for the youngest.  The face would be rounder.   The eyes don't grow much over time: they're almost full size when born, which means, with the smaller opening, it's almost all pupil and iris with very little white.

The jaw grows as we age faster than the skull.  This means that a young child will have a small jaw and nose but enormous forehead.  The features of the face (eyes, nose, mouth) seem to migrate up the head from childhood to adulthood, because the increase in the size of the jaw and development of the teeth increases the size of the lower part of the head, stretching it out.

The arms and legs, fingers and toes will be shorter in relation to the size of the torso and their width, making them look chubby.

they seem like different sizes, not ages.  i suggest you look at some actual references for all ages.  maybe pick a child star who's grown up so you have references at the three different ages. or even a child you know.  because they all look very adult (i'd say 28-30 something), the second looks just shorter and the third just petite.  you have to remember, it's not just chest size, and most 7-year olds are pretty much indistinguishable gender wise (imho)  if you don't look at hair and clothes.  younger kids are different proportions.  leg length, hand size, heads do scale some (try to put on a hat made for a kindergartner), weight changes, and even how joints look change.  young girls and even some adolescents tend to have knobbier knees, longer legs, bigger hands and feet, etc.  in fact, those are part of the characteristics built into anime females to make them seem younger.

Nice idea but yea, breasts, commonly seen, not the 10% of children the develope early on, should be flater.  The face should be rounded up and the head scaled SLIGHTLY larger since a childs head is usually larger when younger and like puppies paws they grow into the hands, feet and head size as they age -  feet look too small as well.  By age 13 or 14 feet are usually the size they would be as an adult or just about there.  Kids at this age tend to look gangly, boys more so but girls as well. 

Just my input.  Your idea is a good one, please continue to develop her as I would love to see the results!

a good proportion i used with classical drawing was about 5 and a half heads for overall height for a "youth".
 
so from the middle of the coller-bone (clavicle) to base of crotch (pelvis) will measure 2 and a half heads, then from the base of the pelvis to the base of the feet (tarsus) will also measure 2 and a half heads, if you then find the middle position between the knees (patella) and the top of the head (cranium), that will give you the ideal place for the belly button (umbilical)

also the length of the forearm (ulna) from elbow to wrist is roughly the same length as the lenth of the overall foot.

The "notesbooks of Leonardo Da Vinci" will give you more info on scaling the Human figure.

So your morph needs to reflect this ratio correctly, or it will just look like a scaled down person, not a young one.

It's official.  I'm about ready to throw my computer on the floor and run it over repeatedly with my wheelchair.  I've made some improvements based on some of your comments, and the new INJ and REM pose for Vicky 4 converts to an FBM nicely.  But the INJ and REM poses I create for the bodysuit refuse to do so.  The FBM I create from those always does nothing to the mesh, no matter what I do with the dial! 

I've been spending the last six hours trying to get the bleepin' thing to work, but it's still being stubborn.  I don't get it!  It worked fine for the first draft!  All I did was bring a few more morphs into the picture,and now it won't work!

AAAAAARRRRRRGGGGGHHHH!!  Even if I create the FBM after applying the morphs manually and then un-apply them manually before testing the FBM, it STILL does nothing!!  What the heck?!

Sounds like the channels are missing or additional channels are not present.  I've run into that many a times.  I use Morp Magic these days and I don't have that issue any longer.  I don't know  how well MM works with this new set up of V4's though!  Wish I could be more helpful to you...

Attached Link: http://www.beautycheck.de/

Well, I finally got the bodysuit to morph properly!  Thanks to all your suggestions, I believe I've made some significant improvements.  I decided to have a one morph for the head and one for the body.  The head morph makes the jaw slightly smaller and the forehead and eyes a little larger.  The body morph flattens the breasts, narrows the hips, thickens the neck, and adds a little extra bulk to the body.  I decided to leave the actual body proportions up to the built-in HeadSize, LegsLength, HandsSize, and FeetSize morphforms to make room for slight individual variation.

I think the youngest I'm going to be able to go with this is 5 or 6 years old.  The reason is that I can only make the head so big in proportion to the rest of the body before it looks too heavy for the neck.  I've thickened the neck as much as I could, but a HeadSize setting of 0.2 is about as far as I feel comfortabe taking it.  It would really help if there was a morph that would thicken the neck in the Z direction instead of just X (or maybe a bi-directional neck length morph).

Here's a test render of a re-done 7-year-old Francesca.

HeadSize: 0.18
LegsLength: -0.8
HandsSize: -0.07
FeetSize: -0.07
Minor adjustments to the hip of the bodysuit for best fit

MUCH better!!

7 yr olds don't have waxed eyebrows. We don't start waxing hairs until the age of like 14. You've made all three of them have perfectly waxed eyebrows. With weight comes feature changes. A pudgy round-faced 7 year old probably has a fatter nose as well as the cheeks.

you've definitely improved the body a great deal.  that said, the face is still perfectly adult.  try using a reference.  while i would generally say that smaller shorter rounder nose, rounder eyes, shorter rounder head, smaller, thinner lips (cupid's bow)  would make her look actually young, i also think so much is what we think we see and justifying that, instead of actually seeing. 

Attached Link: Babyfaceness page from Acadias provided link

Well, here's the full version of the test image for round 2.  I think I'm just a few tweaks away from perfection.

www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php

Do any of you have any idea how to export the FBMs created based on the INJ/REM poses to an externally usable file?  I've tried exporting a morph-target OBJ, but there are two problems with this: 1) whenever I try to load it, it takes forever to load and then a second dose of forever for Poser to resume responding to anything (though that may be more of an individual processor issue, since my laptop only recently got purged of 14 items of malware and underwent a disk defragmentation); 2) since I set the morphs up with a completely blank V4, I then have to export a complete-figure OBJ, which I think will cause the resulting morph target to detract from any character-specific morph settings which have no bearing on age and should therefore be retained.

The reason I ask this is that I'd like to be able to polish this stuff up and package it into a vendible product (or at least a freebie),  If I do do that, it'll probably be quite cheap, since despite the utility of it, all I'd really be selling is two or three morphs and some general guidelines for optimal use.  How well do you guys think something like this would sell?

hmm.  first off, if this is a product, this is the wrong forum.  you want to post either in product showcase or developers.  just an fyi, no biggie.  second, i have to say none of them look really young to me.  others will have other reactions, but for me it really shows that you're working with an adult figure, and it doesn't seem like you've got a specific goal.  that is, it doesn't look to me like you have a drawing, a photo, or anything other than a sort of general idea guiding the morph.   for me i wouldn't be interested in it as a freebie.  it doesn't seem like a significant enough difference from a scaled default v4.  to others who are interested in more petite figures and don't find the several available kid figures suffice,  it will be interesting.  since we're ages away from a version 4 kid (or more accurately 3, since there have only been two sets of kids), i think you will probably get sales.  but, imho, penguinisto's v3 young teen looked younger than your 7-year-old, and i thought she looked just right.  and she was free- he posted his settings.  but then, when v3 first came out, morphs still generally meant custom morphs not dial settings.  now it's common to sell dial settings.

i definitely encourage you to keep going with this and develop it.  and i think the v4 effect might give you sales if you released something not far from what you have now.

Since most if not all remaining criticisms seem to be relegated to matters concerning the face, I decided to focus on that for a bit.

Adult on left, child on right.  Any better?

Nose it too long still and the chin needs to come up a smidge more.  Lips might be a bit fatter and smaller as well.  

While I agree with another poster that the eyebrows are too perfect, that's the map and your not doing the map just the morph so that's not your concern.    Just wanted to make that clear for those that are seeing them and wanting to post about them being too perfect.....

You might get a better feel for the child of this morph if you take the hair off so we can see the over all shape of the head.  Ear positioning plays a role in getting a child like quality as well.  Hair is covering too much and detracting from what you may need to tweak or keeping folks from seeing EXACTLY what they need to see in order to critique it more accurately  .....

Enlarge the eyes (yes there is a dial for that), until the eyeballs are the same size as an adults. Our eyeballs are the same size from birth to death (or so I'm told). Shorten the nose and jaw considerably Scarab

Here's a WIP of V4 as an 8-year old girl:

I doubt I'll ever finish it because such a character is a lot easier to do starting with Maddie or Laura, but the proportions so far are correct, so maybe these pics still might be usefull as a pattern.

You'll need to do a lot of custom morphing to get  V4's body right, because the morphforms are quite limited for such a project and too much scaling will destroy V4's joints.

this looks excellent JoePublic!!!

Actually you'v taken it too far, and your mesh has the proportions of an 8 year old dwarf. Which is exactly why i posted that ref pic, cause it's quite easy to go wrong in this sort of thing if you don't know what you are doing.

@SophiD: Thank you very much. 

@tekmonk:

Before you post snarky comments, you should re-check your sources.

On the Andrew Loomis chart you posted it reads:
"The scale assumes that the child will grow to be an ideal adult of eight head units."

Sorry, but my proportions are correct for a REAL eight year old child and not the artistic ideal that Loomis promotes.
Seven head units are correct for an adult woman or man, not for a ten or eight year old child.
(That's why Luke and Laura look way too old to be "YoungTeens", but make perfect realistic adults with a bit of morphing)

So nice try, tekmonk, but no cigar.

Better luck next time.
:biggrin:

Quote - Sorry, but my proportions are correct for a REAL eight year old child and not the artistic ideal that Loomis promotes. Seven head units are correct for an adult woman or man.

err so every last anatomy textbook on the planet, every art instructor, every DVD is wrong when it says 8 heads is the ideal human proportion, and you, an anonymous guy on a site with not even a portfolio is right eh ?

I'v heard of arrogance, but that takes the cake.

Sorry buddy, but i will stick to people who do indeed know what they are saying, not a short person fetishist like you, no offense.

So, will that be ketchup or mayo with them hats ?

Umm, tekmonk:

Andrew Loomis promotes an ARTISTIC (=UNREALISTIC) IDEAL.
He says so himself in his books,

Look up the other Andrew Loomis references: The eye to chin ratio is different between a 6 year old and an 8 year old.
That's because the proportions of a child's face change when it grows.
You have to compare full head sizes.

So your "comparison" is unfortunately skewed.
The six year old boy you posted is 5 3/4 heads tall, btw.
So it matches perfectly with my 6 heads eight years old girl.

(BTW, children DO grow at different rates, and girls are usually shorter than boys)

I'm sorry, but you're the one who obviously doesn't know what he's talking about.

So prove me wrong... lets see a pic of a real person that has the same proportions as that troll you posted. I will be happy to apologise if you do.

No, tekmonk.
I don't have to "prove" you anything.

I'm actually contemplating if I should report you for trolling.
There were enough personal insults in your previous posts to justify that.
You're pissed because I said "sumphin' bad" about V4 or "Daz" or whatever else, and now you try to harrass me.

Sorry, dude, but I don't bite.

You believe what "aahtists" write in books, I believe what the camera shows me.

Have a nice day.

:tongue2:

In fact i mostly use old posette cause she's the only one light enough for the work i do (besides my own meshes) I only occasionally use V3 (and now V4) where I need to do close up shots or something.

So i dont really care how awesome (or crappy) V3/V4 is or whatever. And DAZ certainly dont pay me a single cent that i would need to 'defend' their products.

But i absolutely do not like misinformation or attempts to push an agenda down everyone's throat. Something that too many people here with axes to grind like to do. And I will always be opposed to such attempts.

If that makes me a troll, then so be it...

And yes, you have a nice day as well :)

Now back on subject PLEASE!  Thanks!

Joe, your attempt is quite good.  Thanks for posting the images!

Why do serious discussions of scale in Poser ALWAYS devolve into flamewars?