Antonia's Hight.
(or "Useless Fact for the Week")

I wanted to make some poses with Antonia sitting in a dining chair. The seat of an average real dining chair seems to be about 17 and a half to 18 inches off the floor. I have a chair which is at that scale in Poser inches.

Obviously when using furniture and architecture props in Poser, it is convenient to size them to real world scale in P6 inches (or mm). Unfortunately most Poser figures are not made to a real world scale, Antonia is just over six feet tall (V4 is roughly six foot and four inches). The average West European woman is about 5'5" (five foot and five inches). So although Antonia is a runt compared to V4, she is seven inches taller than the average woman. This means that if I want to have Antonia looking like an average sized woman compared to correctly scaled props, I have to scale Antonia down.

I made a table of the scale factors that need to be applied to her BODY to make Antonia different heights. To be technically correct, what I actually measured was the altitude of the top of Antonia's head under a certain set of conditions. You may not agree that my methodology for making the measurements gives a true value for her hight, but it is in the "ball park". More on my methodology later. Here is the table:

Hight          Scale                Hight in mm
in feet        of BODY
                  actor

6' 2"           102.492000     1879.6 mm
6' 0.2008"  100.000000     1833.9 mm
6'                99.722000      1828.8 mm
5' 10"         96.951800       1778 mm
5' 8"           94.182000       1727.2 mm
5' 7"           92.797000       1701.8 mm
5' 6"           91.412000       1676.4 mm
5' 5 1/2"     90.719400       1663.7 mm     [average South Africa]
5' 5"           90.026600       1651 mm        [average W Europe]
5' 4 1/2"     89.334000       1638.3 mm     [average Canada, U.S.A.]
5' 4"           88.641500       1625.6 mm
5' 3"           87.256500       1600.2 mm
5' 2"           85.871500       1574.8 mm     [average Japan, China]
5' 1"           84.486500       1549.4 mm
5'               83.101500       1524 mm         [average India, Vietnam]
4' 10"         80.331500       1473.2 mm
4' 8"           77.561500       1422.4 mm

Methodology:

We should be aware of the distinction in Poser between the 'Floor' and the 'GROUND' plane. The Poser 'Floor' is at zero altitude. The Poser 'GROUND' plane is slightly below the floor at -0.001 PNU (about -0.1032 inch, or -2.62128mm).

Antonia was loaded in P6, then odf's 'Attention' pose was applied. Applying this pose does not change the altitude of the head, but it does put the bottom of the feet slightly below the floor, and even very slightly below the GROUND. The result is that if you use a floor prop at zero altitude, the feet look natural (to me), like the heel is slightly compressed by contact with the floor. Or, if no floor prop is used, the bottom of the feet look about level with the GROUND.

Next I loaded a Poser square primitive and set Antonia's Figure Parent to be the square. Scaling the square now scales Antonia, whilst keeping the same part of her feet at floor level.

This is the set up used to determine Antonia's "hight". It is also the reason you may not think my measurements are correct. Remember the bottom of her foot is slightly below the Floor. If you apply 'Drop to Floor', she raises up by about 0.001218 PNU (0.125691 inch, or 3.192543mm). Thus using 'Drop to Floor' would give a slightly different value for the "hight" at any given scale.

The average female heights for different countries as quoted above, come from WikipediA, and should probably be taken with a grain of salt.