All figures are zeroed, with a little negative bend on the feet to get them flat on the floor, and of course the arms have been brought down (shoulder bend).  The bottom edge of the black bar is 6.0 Poser units up, which looks to be 5'10" on the ruler.  V2 and default V4.1 appear to be about 6 feet 1 inch tall.  V3 is maybe a half inch taller.  S3 "petite" is about 5 feet 10 inches tall.  My own character - and this shows how screwed up my perceptions have become - is about 5 feet 7 inches tall.  I actually wanted her to be short, but it turns out she is a little bit above average - back to the drawing board I guess.

I know this has come up before (coughstahlrattecough) but - short people do not have small heads.  Since I've been hearing this, I've been looking at whatever non-manipulated full-length photos I can find of women who are short - Alyssa Milano, Reese Witherspoon, the Olsen twins (who, at 21, are now fair game), Christina Aguilera, etc. - and they all appear to have "big heads".  That is, in comparison to very tall women like Brigitte Nielsen (6'1), Alan Alda (6'2)*, Adriana Sklenarikova (6'1), and everyone's favorite Amazon icon, Julie Strain (6'1).  

An interesting rundown of famous people by height (did you know Janet Reno is 6'2"?)
http://members.shaw.ca/harbord/heights.html

*Mr. Alda included for reference purposes only.

Dr. Geep's Ruler is a sueful tool, but it relies on Dr Geep's Poser scale (1 PNU = 1 foot) which is not quite precise. For a better and more 'precise' version of the ruler, I made it as per Geep's instructions, and then switch your units of measurement to 'feet' in the preferences menu. Load up a cube primitive, and ytrans it to 6.0. This means it's now 6' in the air. Now switching back to your ruler, scale it until the 6' line matches the base of the cube. You now have a 'correct' scale ruler to give you an idea of how tall your various models 'really' are.

I've found a variation of this technique interesting lately, whilst working on an image for the RPG conetst. My picture has a Shadowrun theme, and for those of you unfamilar, the game features characters of different 'sub-races' - Dwarfs, Elves, Orcs and Trolls, as well as humans. I've been using the ytransed cube to give me a guide when scaling the figures to their required heights (1.2m high for a dwarf, and a staggering 2.8m for the troll!) What was the most interesting was that, for the more average sized characters (human, orc and elf), scaling down stil hd to be done to make them 'real' sized.

jonthecelt

Yeah, my units are already set to Feet and I noticed that actually Dr. Geep's scale is a little bit generous to the DAZ figures - they are more like 6' 4" for the default Victoria sizes.  I'll give that a look, thanks for the info.

edit: ugh, I think I will just settle for a ballpark "she's pretty short".  I already have enough trouble with conforming clothing.

It takes some time, but to scale conforming clothing, conform it to the character and then go through and spplay the same scale changes to each relevant bodypart as you did to the base figure.

jonthecelt

Good advice, thanks :)

This may just be a P7 thing(?), but the Poser reference manual claims that 1 PNU = 8.6 feet - NOT 1PNU = 1 foot. This may have changed, I don't know.

With Poser's interface units set to PNU:
I take a box primitive, scale it to 0 in the y axis and translate it to 1. 
I then switch units to Feet and the y trans of my squashed box prim does indeed read 8.6(feet).

This does make Geeps scales incorrect, at least to Poser(7) internal unit measurements. It also makes most figures I've measured so far to be well above average height for realistic humans, although given the mediums leaning toward the 'ideal' and 'heroic' themes perhaps this is understandable.

Am I way off with my theory here? It would seem to be a good thing to have some kind of accepted practice when it comes to scaling.

I can't even get my monitor color and gamma squared away - I could go buy a monitor tuner and get MINE set right, but if people viewing my work have different settings, it will still look wonky.  Same applies to standards of scale.  Realism is not a really big goal for me, but dammit, I want a short character, big head and everything!

PS:  Damn, Poser figures have some big giant-ass feet.

I guess my point is that with an accurate measurement system we can take real world measurements and translate them into the 3d environment. 
Bodypart scaling can often 'look'  wrong, but in fact be perfectly accurate to whatever real world model you're comparing it to.

With this as a base, artistic licence can then be employed if the appearance of a figure just doesn't work with an idea or image. 

Just my personal preference though - it's however you like to work.

No no, I understand completely - I just wish you luck getting a majority to accept a standard (thinking about Stahlratte's effort).

Oh dear, is there really a majority against the idea of a standardised Poser system of measurement?
Seems to me it already exists (In Poser 7 anyway) - no real mystery about how it works. 

I'm not really an empiracle nut or anything, just that in my line of business (commercial art) if the clent asks for a 100cm wide canvas and I supply one at 105cm, the frame generally tends not to fit. 
You can see how a head or a foot gets easily oversized in Poser, not to say that some RW people don't have very large body parts.

I don't use D/S, only Poser - can anyone tell me how the unit measurements compare between the two apps? It might explain some of the figure scaling issues if they operate differently.

5'10" would be 'petite' only in the NBA...;) 'sueful?'...;) Freudian slip?..;)
and don't even get us started on exporting Poser objects into other modeling apps..;)

Well, that's the funny thing, the bottom of the black bar is 6 Poser "feet" above ground - so she's "actually" more like 5'11".

All scaling is relative in Poser.
What you need is a reference picture of a woman whose size you exactly  know:

Aneta Keys pictures were once sold as a texture resource here.
(See pic)

According to her Wikipedia site she is 5'5"

Knowing that, you can import that picture into Poser and map it to the one sided square prop.
Scale it until Aneta's head is as large as V4's.
Then adjust your yardstick so that Aneta measures as 5'5" tall.
Then use that adjusted yardstick to measure V4 and your other meshes.

You now know exactly how tall V4 is, and can adjust all your other Poser stuff to match.
(Or adjust V4. As I said, all Poser scales are relative.)

That's helpful.  How did you pick a point to scale the image to once you imported into Poser?
edit: that is not meant to sound sarcastic, it's genuinely helpful.

Poser scale has changed at least once since geep made the ruler so that could be part of the issue. I don't know why they did it but they did ...

JoePublic - I kind of see your point , but then you can say that most things are 'relative'  in one way or another.

The idea of having a standardised system of measurements is useful so that two or more seperate individuals (say, a figure creator and a props maker) can make items that, when brought together in the same environment, will correspond proportionally to each other - so that the end user doesn't constantly have to resize everything to work together. A figure or character creator can say with some confidence , "my Victoria is 5 foot 11 inches tall", and she will look this tall when loaded next to a Michael who is supposed to be 6 foot 2 inches tall. And when a room prop is loaded into the scene you don't have to spend precious time rescaling it so that the characters will fit through the doors. 
I agree that all these hypothetical objects can easily be rescaled, but this seems so unneccesary when a single creator can make their item based on a standard measuring system so that countless thousands of end users don't have to.
It's also useful in conjunction with using RW pictorial reference material.

Edited to add - the really useful thing is that content creators all work with the same measuring system.

Not sure if I understand your question correctly ?
Adult heads are more or less the same (Slight differences, but not much), so if  the square is dialed so that Aneta's head is as large as V4's head, the body(s) will be in scale, too.

The picture shows the settings I used for the square.

So you used the head as the standard point of reference?  Ok, that makes sense, thanks.

Attached Link: Dr Geep's Scale - DGS Tutorial

Quote - Dr. Geep's Ruler is a sueful tool, but it relies on Dr Geep's Poser scale (1 PNU = 1 foot) which is not quite precise.  ...

jonthecelt

@jonthecelt, et al

Sorry Jon, but ... Please allow me to make a correction here. ... ;=]

Dr. Geep's Scale (DGS) does NOT use 1 Pnu = 1 foot.

DGS uses
1.000 Pnu = 100.0 inches so that
1.000 Pnu = (exactly) 8.333... feet or 8 feet 4 inches (8'4")
which is very precise for all versions of Poser so that
the conversion between Pnu and inches is very easy as shown below.
.
1.000 Pnu = 100.0"
0.100 Pnu = 10.0"
0.010 Pnu = 1.0"
0.001 Pnu = 0.1"
etc.

Therefore, inches can be read directly from the parameter dial setting values.

DGS is NOT intended to try and set any kind of standard, per se.
It was created (originally) for use with Poser 4 which did not have any kind of "Real World" dimensioning available.

DGS may be used or not at the user's discretion. ... ;=]
It is only a tool and not intended to be nor try to set any kind of "standard" for Poser.

You may view this and many other (FREE) tutorials for Poser at Dr Geep Studios.

cheers,
dr geep
;=]

P.S. Questions and/or comments are always welcome. ... ;=]

just as one thing to comment on, Joe... you might find it easier to make comparisons if you used the front camera, which is orthographic, rather than the main or posing cameras (or dolly, or face, and so on). Because this removes perspective, it helps you to get a better sense of where things actually are in proportion to one another. IN the case of your primitive-mounted picture, you have to make some allowances for perspective distortion and distance if you try and match up your figure and the picture in the main camera - if you do it in the front camera, then the z-plane is disregarded, and you have a better idea of your scale.

jonthecelt

@dr geep

Thanks for the correction, Doc... it's been so long since I looked at the actual scale lessons you gave, I've forgotten what scale you recommended!! I do remember that in the dim and distant days of P4, it was a damned useful scale to have, though.

Quote - you might find it easier to make comparisons if you used the front camera, which is orthographic, rather than the main or posing cameras

also helpful, which I should have done in my first comparison, thanks for pointing that out.

Misc data FYI from the above referenced tut.

@ jonthecelt,

No problem ... it HAS been a while, hasn't it. ... ;=]

cheers,
dr geep
;=]

P.S. Note - Poser 7's real world scale is the same as Poser 6's real world scale.

Quote - S3 "petite" is about 5 feet 10 inches tall. 

SP3 is 5'10" tall?!!!  I knew her feet were gargantuan, but I never dreamed that she was considered so tall.  If 5'10" is petite, then her counterpart S3 must be nearly 7 feet tall!!!

I accept that we can all use any scale that we like, but I have to ask this question:

Is it useful for us all to be using different scales, especially content creators (whether commercial or freebies)?

Two more questions:

Is there a commonly used scaling system for Poser and D/S?
Is there a bias toward scaling items like scenery props for use with figures like Vicky because the majority of existing items already do so?

I want to save myself some time here in the long run (in having to re-scale everything I might use). I have no wish to work with Poser measurements if everything else is already scaled differently. I can, as has been suggested, work with any scale I like so I'd prefer to develop one in line with what is already generally being used.
Although I have to argue the point one more time that standardised measuring units that most content creators generally adhere to is by far the most logical approach.

pjz99-

To further muddy up the water....

I was one of the commentators (?) that observed that her head was too big. However, today, while on the way to work I observed three different women that I would call super-petite. To my eye, each one's head seemed too big for their body. I would estimate that each of these women was approximately 4' 8" to 4' 10" tall. 

So, you probably have realistically captured Kaballah's head size, it just looks unnatural even in real life...

My cousin is 4'11" and her head looks "too big" for her body.

Vanna White (Wheel of Fortune) is petite and her head is huge.

Pat Sajak (Wheel of Fortune) had a large head too.

There is no standard head:body ratio. If there were we would all look the same.

this absolute stuff is rather irrelevant.  what you need is a relative scale.   3d is vector with another dimension- scale is whatever you define it to be.  what's important is relative dimensions. 

a few of the women at my work are very, very petite.  as in considerably shorter than i am, and i'm 5'3''.   none of them seem to have large heads, imho.  i think you might start looking at a few references, find one or two you really feel fit your character, and making charts of proportions according to head heights.  and don't use stars.   not only are they not the norm, the pictures of them tend to distort and flatter.  there's actually a famous picture of kate winslet from a magazine or something where she's in front of a mirror.   apparently someone decided she was too chunky and photoshopped about 20 to 30 pounds off her, mostly in butt, thighs and waist.  but they forgot to take care of her reflection, which was rather small and in the background.  it's kind of a funny picture if you know what to look for, but also telling because the edited version looks perfectly natural. 

there are lots of artist references out there- i suggest making use of them. 

I'd still like to see kaballa from a few more angles.  

• been looking in the mirror since I opened this thread - Is my head big?  hmmmmm = )

oh, and vanna white's not very petite.  5'6" is well above average U.S. height, and even thinking about only W.A.S.P. women, i'd say 5'6" seems about average at best.  and her head seems rather small to me.

No way SP3 is 5'10" ... Think the other characters are off too but I am not sure.

actually, i've heard that multiple places.  she's not but so much shorter than v3, who's frequently measured well over 6'.

That's the thing, in Poser's internal feet scale - which Dr. Geep's ruler no longer quite matches - S3 is more like 5 feet 11 (eleven) inches.  After recent effort I think this is due to DAZ just giving their female figures extremely long legs, and this has been embraced by the community so thoroughly (me included) that a whole lot of people just have wonky perception of figure height and proportion in Poser/D|S artwork.  I'm not going to worry about it so much, I'll just check some more references and be mentally prepared for people telling me my character has a big head.

DAZ|Studio uses the metric scale.

I don't know if this helps any or just further clouds the issue, but in Studio, Steph Petite is 166.5cm tall (about 5ft 5 1/2ins), V3 is 179.75cm and V4 is a touch shorter at 179cm (around 5ft 10 1/2ins).

And Dr Geep's 1 metre ruler is 96 cm!

Hmm, DAZ must have just thrown their own scale on it and ignored Poser's, that's a very big difference.

@ JarodIlcast

Hmmm .................................. :blink:**
**My 1 metre ruler ........... is only 96 cm ???

I guess it must have been left out in the rain and shrunk, no?

cheers,
dr geep
;=]

Quote - "DAZ|Studio uses the metric scale.

*I don't know if this helps any or just further clouds the issue, but in Studio, Steph Petite is 166.5cm tall (about 5ft 5 1/2ins), V3 is 179.75cm and V4 is a touch shorter at 179cm (around 5ft 10 1/2ins)."
*Actually this throws a lot of light on the whole figure scaling issue for me. 
That is a big difference in scaling. 

Thanks for the info.

Well Poser's scale changed but DAZ always said that V3 was around that tall, V4 was that tall and SP3 was that tall. I just visually do it since I am not modeling and going for exacts most times but I never got where people said that V4 was 6'2" or whatever. It always baffled me.

I can't help but think that a contributing factor to that confusion about figure heights is the 'relative' nature of the scaling in the various apps. 
It seems like a small issue, because scaling a couple of content items up or down a bit so that they work together is relatively easy to do. But in a complex scene this process adds a lot of extra time. 
Also, IMO and experience, it's not always the best practice to do everything purely by eye - camera perpective can be very misleading when it comes to judging scale. Having to check everything using the front and side elevations gets tedious and can also be confusing (most times if you're using any kind of scenery prop you have to preview in wireframe mode to see into the scene and the jumble of lines can make judging a specific item difficult).
By the sounds of it most people don't even recognise that there is a discrepency between Poser and D/S measurements, and isn't a big deal anyway.
It's really only because the content available can be used in both Poser and D/S that the differences become a problem - if we all used just one of the two apps then everything would be scaled using the same measuring system and so work together. I'm not advocating that we should all either use Poser Or D/S, but that having the same scaling in both would make life a little easier for a lot of people.
In my mind it's just another annoying factor that I wish I didn't have to be distracted by in the creative process.
Ah well, it's not going to change anyway.

Agreed, it is very troublesome and annoying.  However even EF is bad about this issue, e.g. Sydney is exactly 6 Poser feet tall and her head is almost exactly the same scale as V4.  It really looks like e frontier - or whoever they subcontract content creation to anyway - don't even use their own scale.  Kind of cripples any standardization effort right at the beginning.

It may be that EF tries for a partial compromise (making their figures a little taller than they might want to, although 6feet tall isn't so bad) so that their content isn't so different from Daz's. 

I don't think it's exclusively a D/S issue or an EF one. But the scaling discrepency is there all the same.

I think it's mostly EF's fault for not providing an obvious standard frame of reference - you'd think they'd have a ruler prop built into Poser after all this time.  It doesn't help that they changed their own internal scale, if what's mentioned earlier in the thread is true (I'm too new to Poserdom to know).

:b_grin:

Just a thought that has occured to me - how were DAZ able to state categorically the heights of the figures before Poser allowed you to scale in anything other than native units? There was no D|S at that time, so they weren't using their own scale to build these figures. Granted, the scale did shift between two versions of Poser, but not to the point where all the heights previously claimed by DAZ suddenly went wrong. Of course, I could be wrong here, and everything discrepancy-wise could be directly attributable to that change in scales - can anyone do a before and after comparison of a 'known' figure - ie: one of DAZ's where an official height is given?It would be interesting to see if the measurements given by the manufacturers have EVER held up to the reality within the software they were designed for.

jonthecelt

Oh lord ,why is this so difficult? Adressing to e-frontier: I have a Meterset ( available here in free stuff),put a plane,set it to 200 centimeters.In Poser 4 and 5 the parameter palette shows 200 centimeters.Parameters and meterset indicates the same values.Not in P6 and 7.The Parameter palette shows appr. 212 cm . I want that old P4 and 5 scaling back ..

BTW - P4 had no real world scaling which is why I invented Dr. Geep's Scale (DGS) in the first place.

The only "real" standard unit of measure (UOM) in Poser is the Poser native unit (Pnu) which is equal to a Wavefront OBJect unit and a dxf unit ...

i.e., 1.000 Pnu = 1.000 OBJect unit = 1.000 dxf unit

All other UOMs, e.g., real world units, in P5, P6, P7, et al, are calculated from Pnu's.

That's why I use DGS because it is a constant based on an industry standard, i.e., the Wavefront OBJect unit.

It .................. does not change. ... ;=]

cheers,
dr geep
;=]

P.S.
P4 had no real world units
P5 used a mutiplier of  "x"
P6 used a multiplier of "y" (different from P5)
P7 uses a multiplier of "y" (same as P6)

I agree w/ the "relative scaling" concept. Not in the sense of PNU vs. inches or centimeters or whatever, but visual comparison of elements of yr scene.

I highly doubt anyone is gonna take a ruler to yr pic & say "Oooohhh.....that chick is only 5' 2". She's tiny". However, it is a lot more resonable to infer that someone will notice Figure A only coming up to Figure B's shoulder & making the same observation.

A 'nother "scaling tool" worth mentioning is common real-world objects. Yr average household doorway is approximately 80" tall....so by placing the same 2 figures near a door, if the doorknob only reaches Figure B's sternum, one could reasonably assume that "Holy Holiness...Figure A is a freakin' MIDGET!!!".

Obviously this method won't always work (not many doors to be found in forest scenes, fer example), but w/ a lil' lookin' 'round the room yr sittin' in ya can prob'ly find/ tink of a common real-world element  ya can toss in yr scene to give a sense of proportion.

...or sumpin'

Quote - @ JarodIlcast

Hmmm .................................. :blink:My 1 metre ruler ........... is only 96 cm ???

I guess it must have been left out in the rain and shrunk, no?

cheers,
dr geep
;=]

Probably left it in the sun, and it shrunk... rain would have made it longer ;)
Sowwy, the engineer in me couldn't resist this one :(

Then again, I've been told by a few guys that   -->              <-- this much is really 7 inches!
[ducks and runs]

As I see it, the problem is that the industry standard from which the PNU is derived is in itself an abstract unit. The Object and DXF units don't refer (although I am completely ignorant here) to any real world measurement (cm, inches etc) which we would usually use to compare everyday objects or people heights etc (those things which we are emulating in our 3d scenes). 

So at some point someone decided (or perhaps didn't) that a Poser figure was going to be 'This' tall in relation to a PNU/OBJect/DXF unit. Dr Geep came up with his measures and eventually the developers of Poser and then D/S came up with theirs - problem is they all seem to be different decisions. In the meantime loads of content is made that roughly works together and nobody wants to go back and rescale all that to a new standard set of units - no, we the punters can waste our time doing that time and time again. Sigh...it wouldn't happen in a CG studio.

All this seems further complicated by the fact that other software uses different scaling etc, so bringing an object modelled in Max or Lightwave into Poser is a guessing game.
I should note here that I learned 3d with 3dsMax, which only uses real world units (well, Max 5 did anyway), so everything made and rendered within it could easily be referenced to a RW source - I measure the height of my doorframe and model it accordingly using cm or inches etc. And a figure made in the same environment to a RW height naturally looks the way it should in that doorframe. Easy. No having to judge whether something 'looks' correct to my eye before I render. Should I feel I want to make a character more imposing on a scene I can play with camera settings. Actually rescaling an object is a last resort, artistic licence decision. 

I guess I hadn't realised how messy content creation is for Poser and D/S. If nobody really cares then I suppose that's just the way it is - a collection of disperate individuals making stuff that roughly works together. I would still suggest that content creators are making stuff based on some kind of standard (e.g. does it work with V4 or G2 James etc), it's just that it's a fuzzy standard that differs between creators. 

It's no surprise at all that we sometimes get all confused about how tall figures are meant to be, or that this characters head may look too big.

Ok, I've burned myself out - maybe it's not really a big deal anyway.

LOL @ Conniekat8

carodan - but it's still an arbitrary scale.  you bring that stuff into another app, and the "inches" from 3dsmax could be different than the "inches" in the second app.  as i'm sure it is in Poser.  i use 6, and it has inches.  and if everything in poser went by that, it would probably be fine.  but you're using 3ds max "inches", and someone else might be using lightwave, and yet another person is using silo, wings, or blender.  i have no idea which of those apps use inches, and which share the same notion of inches.  since there isn't a standard abstract measurement tool akin to the standard in real life( a meter was once defined by a specific bar in france, iirc), it's still moot.

even in this world, scale is relative.  rulers can have discrepancies between them.  all you can really say is given your measuring instrument, this is how these things relate. 

so don't eyeball it.  if you want, use the poser inches to make a ruler and define everything by that.  the poser internal "ruler" can't actually be wrong because it is the calibration point within poser.