The fact that Vue 9 imports Poser files at a different size from Vue 8 has been bugging me for a while, so I decided to do something about it. I figured if I could really find out what is going on, I would know the reason for the discrepancy.

 I was right.

It’s actually very simple. Vue 9 is right. Vue 8 is wrong. Therefore, the changes in Vue 9’s import were made to fix what was wrong with Vue 8’s import. It makes sense, actually. It’s just that nobody at E-On talks about it.

How did I find out? Well, I decided to first find out how far off Vue imports (both 8 and 9) were from Poser’s internal measurements. To do this, loaded the Poser cube primitive…Poser 7, by the way…and scaled it to be exactly 10 Poser inches. This is a little more complicated than is sounds, because while Poser measures position in units (inches, feet, meters, cm, mm, etc.) it only measures scale as a percentage of the object’s original size, without having any way of knowing what that size was. I got around that by copying the cube and moving the copy up the Y axis exactly 10 inches. Then, using the front camera, I zoomed into the bottom of the copy as close as Poser allows. I changed the display to “outline” in order to have a clear view of the edges of the cubes. I then scaled the original cube until its top perfectly matched the bottom of the copy cube. That meant the original cube was now exactly 10 inches from ground to top. I deleted the copy cube and saved the scene.

Next I imported the scene into Vue 8 and went to object scale to check its size. The 10 inch cube had imported into Vue 8 as 8.965 inches, meaning Vue 8 had reduced the import to 89.65% of its original size.

I followed this by importing the same file into Vue 9. Low and behold, the 10 inch cube imported as…a 10 inch cube! I repeated this with a 1 meter cube just to make sure it worked properly with other scales of measurement. Sure enough, it loaded as a 1 meter cube into Vue 9.

This all means, of course, that Poser imports into Vue 9 are exactly to scale with the way the models are in Poser. This means, also, that you can use Vue 9 to quickly check the dimensions of any poser object.

Just thought you might like to know.

I've just been hitting the 5'9" button after importing a Poser female.  Sometimes I hit the 6' button.

What we can have now is reliable numbers on things such as how much Vickie 4 is out of scale.

Here, finally, are genuine numbers on V4 standing flat footed.

Her height is 6 foot, 3.76 inches...rather tall for a woman!

Her arm-span is 6 foot, 2.12 inches...a little short for her height, but not unreasonable.

She is 12.99 inches thick and I don't know, but I would guess that's quite thin.

Her head is 9.582 inches long. That's actually oversized given that that average human, regardless of overall height has a head almost exactly 9 inches long. However, now that we have accurate  information, we know that by reducing her overall body scale to 93.926%, her head should be as close to 9 inches as Poser can make it.

A quick import update shows that, indeed, her head is now 9 inches long. Also, she is now 5 foot, 11.16 inches tall...which is still tall for a woman, but not unreasonably so. Her arm-span is now 5 foot, 9.62 inches.

For those needing metric here's the conversion:

Stock V4

Height: 192.43 cm

Arm-span: 188.265 cm

Thick: 32.995 cm

Head Length: 24.338 cm

V4 reduced to 93.926%

Height: 180.746 cm

Arm-span: 176.835 cm

Thick: 30.988 cm

Head Length: 22.86 cm

V4 is an OBJ mesh, nothing more, nothing less.

OBJ files vertex positions have NO, repeat NO, real world definition. They are just number in 3D space. OBJ files definition contains NO reference to anything real world related as it is a 3D file format, not some CAD/CAM format.

What programs like Poser or Vue tell you about real world dimensions is nothing more than scaling, by some taken-out-of-the-hat factor, of OBJ values.

The ONLY reference I have ever found to something which look like a standard is a one-line quote in Poser 4 manual which says the P4 male is about 6 feet tall; the corresponding mesh extends for .751 OBJ units in the vertical axis so, for simplicity sake, we can say that 1 OBJ unit is 8 feet.

We are not talking of something like the speed of light, we are just using some conventions to wrap OBJ units (which are what we really need to coordinate) with something nearer to our everyday perception.

The real test is:

1. create in a 3D app a unit sized cube and see how big it is when imported into Vue;
2. import the same cube into Poser and see how big Poser thinks it is;
3. do some kindergarten math to determine conversion factors.

Sorry about being a unit nazi, but a M. Sc. in Physics taught me something about topics like units of measures, significant digits (and the way to report them) and other stuff, like conservation of momentum (no reactionless space drives in real world...).

Bye...

I've learned to just leave each of my app's scale/measurement settings at their defaults.  Changing them all to ft, inches, or meters, etc. just seems to make them mad.

I've never seen a need yet to adjust the size on any Poser imports into 9 Infinite, sorry..

I don't understand "the fuzz" here properly, I think. I do a LOT of importing from different sources (Poser, Xfrog, Onyxtree etc.) and never think of scaling until I have the object inside Vue. Then I scale it manually to the wanted size (using the "lock XYZ" option, of course). I also have a selfmade "metric bars" object that I sometimes use for correct scaling of e.g. an imported house, a doorway should be about 2 m tall (give or take for the presumed age of the house). A similar object is available for free at C3D, "Measuring Stick" I think it's called.

Alex

in that case, how come my models built in Rhino, exported in obj format, import into vue at the CORRECT SIZE? talking huge shop models, so I know they come in exactly right by simply checking sizes in both apps.

:)

The point is that because of the changes in Vue 9's Poser import, Vue and Poser now share exactly the same scale. So long as the figure or prop is the right size in Poser, it's going to be the right size in Vue 9...no adjustments needed. Also, Vue 9 can serve as a measuring stick to tell you if your Poser figures or props are out of scale.

Quote - Alex

in that case, how come my models built in Rhino, exported in obj format, import into vue at the CORRECT SIZE? talking huge shop models, so I know they come in exactly right by simply checking sizes in both apps.

:)

Because both applications use the same magic number. I remember seeing a scaling selection control in a DAZ Studio dialog and it had about 6-8 entries. E.g. possible values for metric system are 1 OBJ Unit every 1cm , 10cm and 1 meter; I expect that nobody, unless under the influence of some "stuff" would select anything else, like, e.g. 1 OBJ unit == 1atto parsec (see this wikipedia article).

Anyway, as you are hinting that I am an asshole, please read the official OBJ file specification and see whether there is a single reference to a unit of measure (I did not find any, but being an asshole might explain my failure).