I have a cast of characters that includes both humans and fairies, and the fairies are meant to be around 10% of the size of an adult human. I'm using V4 and M4 for all the humans and Mavka, Amity, and Vila for some of the fairies. But I'm using V4 for the fairy meant to be a companion to my main character, and I'd like to use V4 for several other fairies as well.

Thus far I've been working on the V4 fairy companion character while she's at 100% size. I have her set up with morphs, skin, hair, and outfit, but before I settle on which wings to use, I thought I should ask for input on the best way to handle a character that's supposed to be so much smaller than the others.

The story calls for the fairy to interact with the main character quite often, in a variety of settings, so it would be impractical to render her separately at full size and then blend a scaled-down render into a scene with humans. I need this fairy figure to be a posable actor in the same scene files that contain humans and human-sized sets and props.

At first I thought the obvious solution was to simply scale the character (with clothes and hair) down to around 10%. But I discovered a few problems, like that scale info doesn't get saved in the Pose library and many adjustment morphs in clothing no longer work as expected. Many 3rd party poses also no longer work as expected.

So now I'm wondering if it would be more practical to create an FBM for the character that includes the scaling down to around 10% of V4's usual size, and to then transfer that FBM to her clothes and wings. But I don't know if that would actually work any better than using the Body Scale dial. Or if there's another solution I should consider.

I'd appreciate any suggestions y'all might have -- other than using a different figure, since V4 is the only figure I have that can make the full range of expressions I need. Thanks!

Get yourself a copy of Lyrra's Height Morphs (sold here at 'Rosity).

https://renderosity.com/mod/bcs/?newsearch=&search=lyrra

When you load clothes, don't forget to select Include Scales in the Properties tab. That way, the clothing will scale with your figure.

I have Lyrra's Child Dials and Height Dials for both M4 and V4 (although I no longer need them for V4 now that I'm using the Sasha-16 WM version).

A while back I used Lyrra's V4 Height Dial to make my fairy companion character as short as possible, but that was about 4' (feet) or so -- and the fairy needs to be more like 8-10" (inches) tall.

As I mentioned, I can get her to that size using the Scale dial on the Body, but then it's a bit tricky to work with a character that small. The camera tends to zoom right past her, adjustment dials on the figure and on her clothes are overly sensitive, and I can't save any poses b/c pose files don't include scale info. So that's why I was wondering if there's a better way to handle a tiny character that's going to be used in the same scene with full sized characters.

Rather than saving your characters as pose files, try saving figures. It holds the scaling and everything else.

I haven't made any figures that small, so I don't know about the dial sensitivity, but you can adjust individual dial sensitivity on parameters pallet.

RedPhantom posted at 10:38PM Tue, 28 November 2017 - #4318659

Rather than saving your characters as pose files, try saving figures. It holds the scaling and everything else.

I always save my characters to the Figures (Characters) library, so that their clothing, hair, jewelry, etc. gets saved along with them. But CR2 files don't hold poses, only figures and props.

What I want to save to the Pose library for my tiny character are the dozens of poses I've put her into by adjusting the various pose dials on all the actor body parts. I don't use IK or third-party poses b/c they seem (to me) to create more problems than they solve. I prefer being able to create the whole pose myself.

However, thus far I have not found a reliable way to save the poses I've created for my tiny character -- and by "reliable" I mean that I can apply the pose to the character in t-pose and have it work just like the original pose. Even the PoseWriter Panel that comes with Poser, which has an option to save scale info, has not been reliable.

I haven't made any figures that small, so I don't know about the dial sensitivity, but you can adjust individual dial sensitivity on parameters pallet.

The only problem is: if you adjust the camera's dial sensitivity to work better for viewing the tiny character, it becomes awkward to use when viewing the full-sized characters!

Here's what I'm wondering now: is it awkward to deal with this tiny character simply b/c she's so small relative to the others OR does it have to do with the fact that she's a scaled-down V4 (rather than a figure that's natively tiny).

I appreciate everyone's responses, but I guess not many other Poser users have this "tiny" problem! :-)

I'm not sure about sasha16, but as for all other figures I've used, simply scaling the figure down to 10% should be plenty sufficient. Its clothing should scale right along with it and it should still pose as normal. Maybe there's something up with sasha's cr2 that is causing problems?

And poses do save with the figure when you save a cr2 to the library. V4/M4 both have their feet posed flat on the floor when loaded from the library, while their zero pose has their feet angled downward. Load classic Jessi (Poser 6) from the library and you'll see her arms are at her sides.

Scaling should also save with the cr2. I've done extensive scaling on various figures and saved them to the library. They all load back in with their scaling still as I saved it.

To focus the camera on a character or any other object you can use the Frame Selected Object icon at the top right of the screen - 3rd icon from the left just past the area render button.

Try scaling a standard V4 with clothing on and then pose her. If she works as expected then it may be an issue with the Sasha16 cr2. If so then contact Karina about it and see if he can help.

AmbientShade posted at 6:31PM Mon, 04 December 2017 - #4318853

I'm not sure about sasha16, but as for all other figures I've used, simply scaling the figure down to 10% should be plenty sufficient.

I had originally made the fairy small through a combination of Lyrra's Height Dial and the Body scale on a Nerd3d WM version of V4. When I switched her over to the Sasha-16 version a few days ago, I used Sasha-16's "True Age & Height" feature to scale her down as low as that would go, and then used Body scale for the rest. I think that, along with some of Karina's suggestions re: saving poses, might work better.

And poses do save with the figure when you save a cr2 to the library. V4/M4 both have their feet posed flat on the floor when loaded from the library,

What I meant was that it would be impractical to save dozens of different poses as CR2's, since a CR2 file includes everything and not just the character's pose. As a way of "getting to know" the personality of each character (and how things will look with the body shapes I've chosen), I tend to put them in a variety of positions that might come up in the course of the story. Sometimes I spend a long time getting a pose "just right," and those are the ones I want to save to the Pose library.

To focus the camera on a character or any other object you can use the Frame Selected Object icon at the top right of the screen - 3rd icon from the left just past the area render button.

I use the "frame selected object" button in Cheetah3D all the time, but I don't use the one in Poser b/c it wants to spin the camera on the zOrbit axis, and I keep that axis locked to 0 b/c Poser also has a habit of randomly spinning all three camera dials by 180º. (My copy of Poser apparently has gremlins!)

Try scaling a standard V4 with clothing on and then pose her. If she works as expected then it may be an issue with the Sasha16 cr2.

I first created the fairy character using a standard V4, and I've also changed her over to the PoserPlace and Nerd3D weight map versions. While those were helpful in making shoulder, arm, and knee bends look better, that's all they did, whereas Sasha-16 comes with so many useful features that I've grown quite attached to her!

I wasn't necessarily having problems with the fairy character, but rather I wanted to know how other Poser users handle having one character be significantly smaller than all the others in the context of re-using the cast of characters for a graphic novel or webcomic. The fairy character is the companion of my main character, so they'll be in hundreds of shots together -- and I wanted to know if anyone had tips to share about handling the size difference in that context. But it could be that no one currently reading these forums has been in a similar situation.

Here's a draft render I did while playing around with having Sauscony (the fairy) make Sara (main character) laugh. They're so cute!

The problems I've ran into using scaled down characters all relate to the wonkiness of the shadows a reduced scall causes. How are you avoiding that? At most, I've only scaled human characters down slightly, with no issue.

Thinking outside the box, have you tried keeping the fairy at 100% and scalling the 'regluar sized' characters up 90%? It might be a work around for you... Should also avoid any strangeness in the shadows