General problem with children's proportions in DAZ items
cherpenbeck
Posts: 1,416
When I saw the toddler twins today, my first impression was: Yes! Somebody at last got the faces right! They look really cute.
But, somehow, they still look a bit off ...
It's the proportions which don't work with the babies and toddler, which make them look arkward. Every single part of the twins is nice, but put together, they don't fit. it looks as if they have been taken from photos of different ages and stuck together like a not-really-fitting puzzle.
Now that is something which can be remedied by us consumers ourselves, as long an we know what really is off with the bodies. Therefore I made this picture for correction of lengths. Keep in mind that these twins aren't really babies (which have more fat, are more chubby, and next to no visible neck), and that two or three years old with as much fat as these two have are, by all medical statistics, already a bit overweight. Then these twins could be a very nice addition to the genepool.
Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2025 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
They also load to the same physical size (well, height) as 5 year olds. At least they did for me. 0o
.. I spent months back in the Gen4 days trying to develop a teen and child character, We didn't have the merchant resources to do so like we have today so it was a lot of trial and error yet a few of us actually succeeded.
Attachment #1 my teen character built off of V4
Attachment #2 my child character built off of V4..
This is a render I did earlier today of one of the Toddler Twins for Genesis 8 placed next to a 3 year old and a 5 year old, the 5 year old is a Growing Up morph I had earlier saved out as a scene-preset from the standard Genesis 3 Male, the 3 year old is basically just stock Genesis Basic Child. A couple days ago I had loaded one of the Toddler Twins for a scene I wanted to make, placing him into a vignette background scene that had just a wall with wainscoting, and a floor... and something looked a little off. To compare for scele, I loaded one of my saved-out 5 year old characters and instantly realised WHAT was "off" about the Toddler Twins: They're the same height as my 5 year old! :D :D
The title of thes scene is: "Would you say this toddler is a might.... big...?" :D :D
edit: Hmmm... the image is coming out a might squooshed from the sides. How do I fix that? 0o
Anyway, it's in my gallery, here: https://www.daz3d.com/gallery/#images/857426/
Age-wise there exists a problem when we get into the years between toddlerhood and pre-adolescence. Those years are so fleeting and hard to nail down to one particular or another body-form. And none of the available products does it without considerable re-engenering on the part of the end user.
It's not just a matter of size or weight or slimness or height or even body part proportionality. Children are not just mini-adults. There is someting very unique about how all these factors interact and work together to produce a believable child model. At present they either look like scaled-down adults or scaled-up babies and not children.
After a bit more poking around online, I figured out that to make the toddler figure a one year old, I would set his or her scale to about 41%, and for a two year old I'd set it to 44%. (The Toddler Twins as-shipped are set to 60% scale.) Apparenty, children grow about 2 inches in height in a year, with the average one year old being about 28 or 29 inches tall, and an average two year old being about 31 or 32 inches tall. I suspect I'm probably going to set it to 42% or 43% to have it sort of in the middle there, like a year and a half old or something.
It's not just toddler and pre-adolescence - I think expecting a mesh model designed to be optimal at adult size and proportions to be able to squeeze down to infant or small child size is the problem.
Kids 4 to the latest Growing up morphs - they never seem to capture all the factors, some quite nebulous. Reducing on a global scale is still going to miss by a wide margin as the way the human body grows from birth isn't set on a global scale for the entire frame - head, arms and legs scales are often 'off' from adult proportion.
In Nomad-ads piccy, the Toddler looks to have an almost adult frame - width and depth, he looks like he'd be pretty heavy to pick up - the comparison Growing up and Basic Child look the right frame 'weight' and the one on the right even the right limb weight, the one on the left has an arm length which is maybe a tad more adult scale (a little too long).
I think one of problems is that the DAZ adult character proportions are like the idealised art figure, unusually tall, so once you start trying to make them into children the proportions are off to start with.
I used DO morphs about 3 years ago to create a 4 - 8 year old using G3M, DO Heads morphs and DO Body Morphs. It's got that undeveloped 5 year old look but I'm not sure if I got a anatomy reference for 5 year old anatomy range if the rib cage, legs, and lots of other things I changed fall within those ranges. I think I just used a general anatomy guide for pencil drawings from baby to geriatric ages you can find if you do a google search if I remember correctly. After the morphs are about correctly scaled then you still have to use suitable female texture sets, they all aren't suitable, and you have to use them whether girl or boy.
I agree. Daz had to make some compromises to facilitate clothing development, and in order to standardize scaling for poses, etc. Like if you want to scale down female characters to the IRL 5'4" US average height and males to 5'9 US average height, none of the interacting poses work anymore without serious adjustments. These character models have to do a lot of things in a lot of situations and places. When you try to create a one-size-fits all model, you're not going to get everything perfect.
That has nothing to do with clothing development and doesn't make sense. How would that apply if you make a custom figure, or a third party figure like Dawn? And you will need to adjust poses once you change the proportions of a figure (size or shape) regardless.
...it was a real challenge back in the Gen4 days before K4 was released Actually consulted growth and proportions charts to create a viable 7 - 8 year old and 12 - 13 year old. Had to adjust scaling of the head, upper & lower limbs, and torso segments all individually.
Clothing fits were a total pain as I could only use V4 clothing (as V4 was the base), much of which was inappropriate for a young child and what little did work would also distort terribly in the chest region because it was designed to conform to an adult female.
Rendering without clothes being problematic... this is where dForce items really help a lot. If it's not dForce/converted to dForce, or not specifically made for smaller child-like shapes, then I don't really bother trying to fit. There are plenty of dForce clothes and clothes that respond well to dForce.
As for body shape/dimensions, accumulate enough child shaping dials, and then it gets close enough. No different than bigger ladies or any other human shape that isn't Victoria-style supermodel. You just need enough dials and the mind's eye to put them all to use.
I don't render them often. AliveSheCried has a few dials at Rendo which help, as I recall. Getting the joints right, the torso shape - it's not just a dialed-down adult, but it gets complicated for many reasons to work in child shapes. Of course, with the clothes on, then getting the exact details right underneath is somewhat irrelevant.
...back then about the only options we had were dFromers or taking the character and clothing into Poser and hoping we could correct things using the programme's cloth dynamics.