Before I got to CL with this, somebody better check me.

Poser 5 has the potentially nice feature that instead of moving things around (trans X, trans Y, etc.) in Poser units, you can move them in feet or meters (relative to the scale of Poser objects.) Cool -- except the translation seems to be off.

In Poser 4 (and below, so far as I know), the Poser unit was equal to eight feet in the real world. In other words, the Dork was .750 Poser units, and we understood that in the scale of his world he was six feet tall.

Well, in P5 he's still .750 Poser units. Everyone is still the same size relative to Poser units. The Poser unit itself has not changed:

The green box in the picture above is a one-sided square that has been transited exactly .750 units above zero, as you can see by the parameter dials. That's still the six-foot height on the lineup prop I created for Poser 4, and the Poser characters all have their old heights in the line-up. Posette (like Judy) is 5'7, Vicky is 5'10", Don (like the Dork) is 6', Michael a tad taller, say 6'1". All of these, even Judy, are somewhat over average height for Americans (even more so for many other nations), but not outrageously so, very suitable to the healthy young specimens they appear to be.

But here's the problem: Go into Edit, and General Preferences, and change the display from Poser native units to Feet, and you get this:

P5 believes that our old 6-foot line is 6.452 feet up! If we shrink my old lineup measure until its 6 foot lines up with Poser 5's notion of 6 foot, like so:

then Posette is now six feet tall, the height of only the very tallest supermodels, and Vicky is some sort of basketball player. Mike is 6'6", which is not freakish, I guess, but still highly unusual. If we were to take this new definition of the Poser unit as 8.6 feet seriously, all the props and assumptions we have made in the past are going to be out of proportion.

I don't think CL did this deliberately. I couldn't see how they'd made such a weird mistake until I created these visuals for you. Now it's obvious that when setting up the calibration for feet and inches (I haven't checked meters), someone used Posette/Judy for the six foot yardstick instead of Dork/Don -- throwing everything off.

Or have I made some mistake? Please backstop me on this. Thanks!

Bill Adams