What rules of thumb do we have for getting objects "in scale" in Poser? To put it another way, how tall do we think Posette, Vicki, Mike, the object cylinder, et al., would be in real-world feet and inches?

I feel sure DAZ has mentioned this somewhere, but when I ask them in a tech question, I get no reply.

So--anyone, please--what heights do you assign the figures, or what other rules do you have for scaling, and do you know of any "authoritative" answers to these questions from DAZ, Curious Labs, or whoever? Thanks.

I haven't seen an official word on this from CL or DAZ. I think that the generally accepted heights are 6 foot 1 for the P4MN and 5 foot 11 for the P4NF. I could be wrong on that 'cause it's been some time since I've seen a thread on this subject. Thoughts anyone?

I generally figure that one poser unit is 8 feet (=96 inches).

bushi: Thanks for starting the discussion. But if Posette were 5'11, Vicki would be 6'2 or more, and even if we think of her as a fashion model, that seems too tall. My first guess would be that "Ideal Adult Height" for Posette is 5'8 (still several inches above average U.S. female height, by the way, but maybe that's where the "ideal" comes in), bringing Vicki to just under 5'11. Did you perhaps mean Vicki when you said 5'11?

doozy: I know this must be a spectacularly dumb question, especially from someone who's been using Poser for five or six years, but what do you mean by a "poser unit?" I know that if you import a Wavefront Object at "100% figure height" it comes in at Posette's height, so that's obviously not what you mean. What's a unit?

Hmmm ... if memory serves (and god knows it could be faulty) the last time I saw a question about figure heights was before Vicky came out. As such it was related specifically to P4NM and P4NF. I guess those two had to shrink somewhere along the line. :)

Hrmmm... I don't think that Curious or Daz ever made any "official" statements on how tall Ideal Adult, Fashion Model, and Heroic were. Maybe it never occured to them to get into that kind of detail? However... do a browse through Renderosity and 3DCommune freestuff in the "Utilities" section. There's at least three sets of poser "height rulers" that have been posted at various times in both american and metric scales. If I recall correctly, the one on my hard drive puts the default Michael at about 6'1" or 6'2", and the P4 Male at 6' even. Liteluvr did one of them, I don't reacall who did the others... Even if they're not perfect, they do give a scale for comparison to other figures and props. ;]

Here is a quote from the text file accompaning Freakachu's "TwoMeter.pp2" (from the free stuff).

"the standard poser unit equals one and a third DFX units, or eight feet...The poser unit is the distance that the translate tools or parameter dials need to move an object a single unit in Poser. (i.e. A "y-trans" setting of 1.000 would move an object 8 feet above an object with a "y-trans" setting of 0.000)

Since the male figure is 0.750 poser units tall it's easy to do the math and divide the units into their English and Metric counterparts.

Here's the breakdown:

1 foot = 0.125 poser units (a "box" prop scaled to 125% would be a cubic foot)
1 meter = 0.410 poser units (a "box" prop scaled to 41% would be 10 cubic centimeters)"

Thank you all for these excellent answers! I now know how to proceed.

Well, if you look at any poser file, you find this stuff... v 0 0.463093 -0.051737 v 0 0.461964 -0.044512 v 0 0.453358 -0.039867 All these measurements are in "poser units". It is the underlying coordinate system used by Poser. And as lesbentley said, they are the units in the dials you see within Poser (distances, not angles, proportions, or percentages).

Just wanted to complicate the discussion even further. In the 'figure' section of the cr2, there's the line 'canonType 8', which, as far as I know, refers to the figure's height in 'heads' - ie. posette = 8 heads. Now, to me, this is the craziest thing I've ever heard, but Metacreations seemed to take it seriously. Would anyone care to enlighten me on the reasoning behind it? And what does it actually have to do with the figure height? mac

That is strange, mac. Actual human adults tend to fall closer to six than seven heads tall, much less eight. Why do you associate the words CanonType with heads-height? (Just asking; I'm very ignorant about cr2s, myself.)

Mac's right, Try it yourself, set the different figure heights, and save to the library, you'll see the different canon typs in the cr2 (and you can set the head lengths in the guides to count 'em. Ideal adult is 8, fashion model is 8.5, heroic model is 9. And for a grin, set the height to baby. Bizarro! :) Regards- Lemurtek

Okay, Mac is certainly right that Posette is 8 heads high. But I was overstating the case (ur, uh, or to put it another way, completely wrong) when I said actual humans were more like 6 heads high. The actual average is apparently closer to 7. Here's a link to what figure-drawing teachers think about these proportions: http://www2.evansville.edu/drawinglab/body.html (But note: although the actual figure is supposed to be 7ish, elsewhere on the page it says that 8 heads "looks better in a drawing". I guess Poser feels the same way! --------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Okay, I continue to research head-height proportionality, and here's what I learn: Metacreations uses heads as a base proportion for constructing figures because that's what most art teachers have traditionally done. And although Posette's "ideal height" of 8 heads doesn't have much to do with women in the real world, it's not out of line with women in illustrations. Here's a quote from John Adkins Richardson's COMPLETE BOOK OF CARTOONING (Prentice-Hall, 1977, and a terrific book of this kind, by the way): "The average man or woman is about 7 1/2 heads tall, in a proportion first noted by the Greek sculptor Polycleitus (active circa 450-420 B.C.) who worked out a canon of ideal proportions of which only rudiments have come down to us. Later Greek sculptors, notably Praxiteles (active circa 370-330 B.C.) and his near contemporary Lysippus, lightened the proportion to 8 heads. By the time of Michaelangelo (1475-1564) the ideal proportion for a male figure was 8 1/2 heads, a proportion rare among living men but extremely impressive in statuary. Because of its applications it came to be known as the 'heroic proportion.' . . . [M]ost adventure heroes in the comic pages are 8 or 8 1/2 heads tall." (The big exception is Prince Valiant, at 7 1/2 heads tall, and if you look at those classic strips -- based on the more realistic illustration-style of, say, Howard Pyle, rather than on comic-strip norms -- you'll see how different the proportions of all Hal Foster's characters look compared to those in a contemporary comic.) So . . . what does it all mean? I'd say Metacreations is not so far out of line using 8 heads for Posette's ideal proportion, now that we know their "ideal height" is really a "heroic proportion" for a figure a few inches taller than average height. We are all used to seeing this proportion in illustrations, so much so that real proportions can seem wrong on the page. (I have to admit that I never saw anything out of proportion in Posette until we started this discussion.) Most of us use Poser for illustration purposes, so maybe Metacreations was right on the money with 8 heads. On the other hand, everything we've developed so far in this thread confirms me in my long-held gut opinion that the "fashion-model" version of Posette is really a "basketball-player" or "glandular-case" version. It is Vickie who is the real fashion-model height, and a pretty tall model at that. I'll have one more comment on this when I finish collating all the "real-world" heights of the Poser characters. Which I can finally do now -- thanks, once again, to the great responses I got to my original question.

Coolness, wadams... when you get them complied, please post what you come up with. I'd be curious.

From the Oxford English Dictionary 'Canon - general law, rule, principle or criterion. (Greek - Kanon - rule)' Good research, wadams. If you get any more, I'd be interested. I'm thinking on compiling a Poser FAQ along the lines of 'Everything-you-skipped-in-the-Poser-Manual-and -meant-to-go-back-to-one-day' LOL Basically just a collection of obscure Poser facts aimed at newbie to intermediate, and mainly stuff that people are constantly answering in the forums. And this question is the sort that crops up again and again. mac

Maclean, that sounds like an excellent idea. As for me I skiped almost all of it, it has the style and flow of a teliphone book. I know I should read it, but it's such torture.