A Bare In His Native Habitat (Patreon)

If you folks will recall, back in December I posted several images of my 3D Cobalt, on FA and here on the ol' Patreon here. And I mentioned that the model was badly outdated and that I should think about updating him.

Well, with those thought in mind, as my semi-new-years-resolution, a couple days ago I upgraded my copy of POSER to the latest version, to see if they'd added any new tools that would make the job easier. And in fact, they have - they've actually added something the program has desperately needed since it was created.

A way to import models at an accurate scale.

For most of it's life, Poser allowed you to import a model one of two ways - at 1:1 scale, or at a percentage of "standard figure size" and if you Google for that, you'll discover that nobody actually knows what Poser's "standard figure size" is.

So, why is this a problem? Because for some reason, Poser scale isn't the same scale every other 3D program uses. It's actually 1% of it. Poser models are TINY.

This meant that if you opened up 3DS Max and constructed a cube at one foot by one foot by one foot - when imported into poser, it would be 100 feet by 100 feet by 100 feet.

And building at 1% normal scale in your average 3D program isn't feasible, since it tends to be so small that most of the building tools don't work properly, and trying to get a camera in there to see what you're dong is also nearly impossible.

Poser now allows you to import objects at a percentage scale of your own choosing. So, build at full size, and import at 1%, and everything lines up perfectly on import.

This is such a no-brainer idea that I'm amazed it took them 11 versions before adding it.

I dug out my old, unfinished UNREAL model of the Skypad, and started importing bits. And it imported pretty much perfectly.

The model itself is far from done, only a couple rooms got built, and mostly what I had were empty rooms and empty shelves. SO I knocked up those bits of bric-a-brac to fill the place out a bit.

And once I begin work on Cobalt 2.0 I'll be able to import him into the program at exactly four feet tall, rather than trying to guess how close I can get to that compared to "standard figure size."