1. Poser’s units
Sorry, no renders yet. I had to learn that one should know his units.
1.1
Why units matter
I wanted to make a room that is about 10 by 10 meters in size. In my modeling application it
was easy to do this. Then I exported the model to Poser. But there it was not 10 by 10 meters
any more. “What the heck is that?” I thought.
Image 1: Poser's unit setting
Ok, I learned that one meter in application A does not automatically mean one meter in
application B. So how to get the value to make it consistent?
1.2
Units the complicated way
I chose [Edit]-[General Preferences] in Poser and set a unit that made sense to me. As a
German I live in a metric world so Meters was perfect for me.
Then I loaded Poser’s default box into the scene. Unfortunately this still did not tell me much.
How big is this box?
Image 2: Box with front camera and wire frame view
The trick was to make a second box and use one of the translate
dials. I took the xTran parameter. The nice thing about those
parameters is, that they follow the units set in the preferences.
E.g. if I set the unit to meters and dial xTran to 1, then the object
moves by 1 meter.
Image 3: Translate dials follow Poser's unit preference
Now I had a starting point. I found a trick to make a box which
would be 1 meter in size.
I added another default box to the scene and scaled and moved it
by eyeballing so that it fit into my 1 meter reference.
In the end I got the result that I needed to upscale the default
Poser box by 381,45% to get a one meter cube. In other words,
the Poser default box seemed to be 0,26 meters in size.
I was surprised because in a forum somebody wrote that the
Poser box is 10 inches (=0,254 meter) in size. So I expected to get
an upscale value of 372,64%.
Image 4: The Poser box is 0,26 meter in size
This information was slightly inaccurate. Here is the
proof. The Poser box is a little bit larger than 10
inches.
Image 5: The Poser box is larger than 10 inch
Ok, now I had a one meter Poser box.
Next question was how to get the
relation between Poser’s size and the
one of my modeling application?
For that I used the same trick again. I
made a 1 meter box in Lightwave.
I placed it with no X or Z offset in the
middle of the 3D space. In Y direction I
moved it up by 0,5 meter to place it
exactly on the ground plane.
Next part was to export the box as an
obj file. As I did not know the scaling
values at this point, I left everything at
100%.
Image 6: A one meter box in Lightwave
Image 7: Lightwave obj export at 100%
Then I imported it into my reference
scene with the Poser box.
[File]-[Import]-[Wafefront OBJ]
The result showed that one meter in
Lightwave becomes much larger in
Poser.
Image 8: Poser obj import settings
Image 9: Lightwave obj export to Poser at 100% scale setting
But by down scaling the Lightwave box
to the size of my 1 meter reference box I
was able to get a conversion value.
So I assumed: if I want a Lightwave
model to have the correct size in Poser,
both apps should use the same units and
I either need to downscale the model in
Poser or in Lightwave to 38,14%.
But read further.
Image 10: Assumed Lightwave obj to Poser scale value is 38,14%
1.2.1
Units the simple way
In the preferences there are Poser native units. Let’s see what this
does.
I made a box, moved it by 1 using the xTran parameter.
Then I switched the Units to Meters without touching the xTran.
Image 11: Poser native units
It seemed so that the value did not change. It still shows 1. That’s a
glitch in Poser. If you click into the number field you see that the value
has changed but Poser forgot to update the GUI.
Nevertheless, we can use this trick to get the conversion from Poser
native units to any other unit it offers.
In case of meters: 1 Poser native unit = 2,62128019 meters
or vice versa: 1 meter = 0,3814929833960253 Poser native units
Image 12: Changing Units does not update parameter values in GUI
Well, this value was familiar to me: 0,3814929833960253. With my complicated way of
finding a conversion from Lightwave meters to Poser meters I assumed that I need to
downscale an imported obj to 38,14%. Now Poser shows me that the more accurate
conversion value is about 38,15%.
Conclusion:
Poser interprets one Lightwave meter as one Poser unit.
From
To Poser 1 meter
Lightwave 1 meter
Lightwave 1 cm
downscale to 38,15%
upscale to 3815%
Poser 1 centimeter
Poser 1 foot
downscale to 0,3815% upscale to 125%
downscale to 38,15%
Table 1: Lightwave meters and centimeters conversion to Poser
upscale to 12500%
Note:
By the way, the default Poser box is 10,32000065 inches in size.
More about this here: http://www.morphography.uk.vu/scaleobj.html
Poser 1 inch
downscale to 0,97%
downscale to 97%