The first thing to understand is that in the OBJ file format, there is no scale information, on purpose.

So before you can ask "why is Poser stuff so small" you have to actually have a definition for "too small" versus "correct". Since there isn't one, despite however much we'd like to establish it, one is wasting ones time demanding to know why two different programs interpret OBJ units differently. You can just as easily ask, with the same logic, "why is Max stuff so large"?

The OBJ file is unitless, so each application must either pick a unit, or ask you to pick one.

In Poser 4, one OBJ unit = one Poser Native Unit = 8 feet = 96 inches. Many models were made to this scale. Many other programs established that one OBJ unit = 1 foot or 1 meter. All of these are completely arbitrary and conversions between different applications must be dealt with. The fact that Poser's happens to be the most inches per OBJ unit is not any sort of indictment. In all the conversions, at least one application has to be the largest conversion, and at least one application has to be the smallest conversion. It's a simple consequence of there being no standard. Just like in any room, there is a shortest person and a tallest person, and we don't go yelling at them demanding to know "why are you the shortest?" There is a shortest  person no matter what you do. There has to be a shortest person. If you were to demand that the shortest person leave because he offends you, then there would be a new shortest person. The only solution is to get rid of everybody - only then is there no shortest person.

And so too there has to be an application with the smallest application scale. So what? Do you plan to get rid of them all until there is no smallest?

Meanwhile at some point Poser changed the OBJ unit and the Poser Native Unit to 103.2 inches, up from 96 inches. This might have been P5 or P6 - I can't remember. I suspect it was P5, when the node-based material ability was introduced. The material system is heavily tied to inches internally. I could show you dozens of examples of why this matters. Perhaps the change to 103.2 was important and intentional. Or perhaps it was a mistake perpretrated by a math-challenged software developer. SM has never revealed this to me.

In any case, if you really want to deal with Poser inches, then you must take into account that one OBJ unit = 103.2 Poser inches.

However, because so many figures were created to the OBJ unit=96 inch scale, the new scale makes them seem absurdly tall. By that argument, the useful conversion is actually 1 OBJ=96 inch, instead of the 1 OBJ = 103.2 inch, and you just have to accept that the units don't read out correctly when looking at them in Poser.

Fortunately, zero is the same in all of these scales. Be glad it is, otherwise we'd have serious nightmares. Like Fahrenheit versus Celcius, where 0 and 1 are both different.

So - if you want the numbers exact, you have to first understand how to specify the number in Max, and then choose 1/103.2 or 1/96.

But if you only have 3 digits, you're screwed.

1/103.2 = 0.00968992248
1/96 = 0.0104166667

You can see why .01 or .009 or .011 doesn't work for anything.

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