Proportions and Sizes

whispers65 · July 16

I'm starting a new middle-school novel series and plan to use DAZ Studio for character renders. I'll eventually need a fairly large cast, so I'm trying to establish a consistent workflow before I get too far.

My biggest challenge isn't creating individual characters—it's keeping the head-to-body proportions consistent across the cast.

If I start with different Genesis 8 character morphs and then use things like Youth Morph and Height to make them into approximately 12-13 year olds (around 5' tall), I end up with characters whose heads don't seem to be in proportion with each other. Some appear to have noticeably larger or smaller heads relative to their bodies, even when they're intended to be the same age.

My questions are:

Do Height and Youth Morph scale the head proportionally, or do they mainly affect the body?
Is it better to create one "base" middle-school boy (and girl) with proportions I like, then build every character from that base by changing facial features, body shape, hair, etc.?
Are there any recommended morphs or workflows for creating believable middle-school characters while keeping proportions consistent across a large cast?

My current thought is to make a base boy and girl, then create variations such as thin, average, athletic, and pudgy, but I'm wondering if there's a better approach.

crosswind · July 16

whispers65 said:

I'm starting a new middle-school novel series and plan to use DAZ Studio for character renders. I'll eventually need a fairly large cast, so I'm trying to establish a consistent workflow before I get too far.

My biggest challenge isn't creating individual characters—it's keeping the head-to-body proportions consistent across the cast.

If I start with different Genesis 8 character morphs and then use things like Youth Morph and Height to make them into approximately 12-13 year olds (around 5' tall), I end up with characters whose heads don't seem to be in proportion with each other. Some appear to have noticeably larger or smaller heads relative to their bodies, even when they're intended to be the same age.

My questions are:

Do Height and Youth Morph scale the head proportionally, or do they mainly affect the body?

Yes and No ~ Height morph just affects body + neck. Youth Morph affects body + neck + head.

Is it better to create one "base" middle-school boy (and girl) with proportions I like, then build every character from that base by changing facial features, body shape, hair, etc.?

There won't be big difference in terms of final result if you customize each character directly.... but creating "base boy + girl" firstly can help with saving some time for customization~~

Are there any recommended morphs or workflows for creating believable middle-school characters while keeping proportions consistent across a large cast?

I rarely make teenagers, boys and girls etc. ~~ see if other folks can give some suggestions ~~

My current thought is to make a base boy and girl, then create variations such as thin, average, athletic, and pudgy, but I'm wondering if there's a better approach.

sounds like a good idea to me ~~

whispers65 · July 16

Thanks. Just got back from Door Dashing so I will try some things. Just knowing about the Height and Youth Morph alone helps a lot. I should have experimented more, but I didn't think about it.

Havos · July 16

You can use the "Head Propagating Scale" morph or the "Youth Head Proportion" morph that comes with Growing-up to adjust head sizes so they are all roughly the same. Do that last, as dialing in various head morphs can make a head bigger or smaller. If the head needs a lot of scaling you might think the neck looks too thick or thin afterwards, so use the "Neck Width" morph to adjust this back to normal levels

whispers65 · July 17

Havos said:

You can use the "Head Propagating Scale" morph or the "Youth Head Proportion" morph that comes with Growing-up to adjust head sizes so they are all roughly the same. Do that last, as dialing in various head morphs can make a head bigger or smaller. If the head needs a lot of scaling you might think the neck looks too thick or thin afterwards, so use the "Neck Width" morph to adjust this back to normal levels

Thanks. I do have growing-up.

kyoto kid · July 18

...In the Gen4 and early Genesis days before Growing Up was released, those like myself used actual growth and height charts along with an "in viewport" height guide it was rather cumbersome as one has to also take into account proportions of the limbs as well.

As to head - body relationship it pretty much involved "eyeballing it though photo studies did help

I had been designing young and teen characters since the Gen4 days when all we had was Vicky 4. One of he base characters I often resorted to was Thorne's Tommi for V4. . When Steph4 was released along with the Natural Petite Morphs. it felt like a "godsend" though by that time Genesis1 was already waiting in the wings,

The first truly viable teen characters didn't appear until Genesis with Thorne's Young Teens5 (Justin and Julie).in mid December of 2012

With the Growing Up morphs, Zev0 did us a massively huge favour.

Below one of my more successful Gen4 teen attempts from July of 2011 that used Steph 4 as the base and was done on a 32 bit ntbook in Daz 3.1.

Dareshiranu · July 19

kyoto kid said:

...In the Gen4 and early Genesis days before Growing Up was released, those like myself used actual growth and height charts along with an "in viewport" height guide it was rather cumbersome as one has to also take into account proportions of the limbs as well.

As to head - body relationship it pretty much involved "eyeballing it though photo studies did help

I had been designing young and teen characters since the Gen4 days when all we had was Vicky 4. One of he base characters I often resorted to was Thorne's Tommi for V4. . When Steph4 was released along with the Natural Petite Morphs. it felt like a "godsend" though by that time Genesis1 was already waiting in the wings,

The first truly viable teen characters didn't appear until Genesis with Thorne's Young Teens5 (Justin and Julie).in mid December of 2012

With the Growing Up morphs, Zev0 did us a massively huge favour.

Below one of my more successful Gen4 teen attempts from July of 2011 that used Steph 4 as the base and was done on a 32 bit ntbook in Daz 3.1.

Quite nice. For what my opinion is worth anyway.

kyoto kid · July 19

..thank you.

Here is my first attempt at a child (about 10 years old) that I did in 2009.

Again Zev0 maed it much easier.

kyoto kid · July 19

...thank you.

Here is one of my early attempts at a child (about 10 years old) that I did i 2009.

Yeah, Zev0 made it so much simpler.

whispers65 · July 19

kyoto kid said:

...In the Gen4 and early Genesis days before Growing Up was released, those like myself used actual growth and height charts along with an "in viewport" height guide it was rather cumbersome as one has to also take into account proportions of the limbs as well.

As to head - body relationship it pretty much involved "eyeballing it though photo studies did help

I had been designing young and teen characters since the Gen4 days when all we had was Vicky 4. One of he base characters I often resorted to was Thorne's Tommi for V4. . When Steph4 was released along with the Natural Petite Morphs. it felt like a "godsend" though by that time Genesis1 was already waiting in the wings,

The first truly viable teen characters didn't appear until Genesis with Thorne's Young Teens5 (Justin and Julie).in mid December of 2012

With the Growing Up morphs, Zev0 did us a massively huge favour.

Below one of my more successful Gen4 teen attempts from July of 2011 that used Steph 4 as the base and was done on a 32 bit ntbook in Daz 3.1.

Thanks. After writing my first two, novels, in this series I decided to automate things as much as possible with python. I'm writing a program to auto generate schools and I use height/growth charts a lot. and I'm using a measure board. but was looking for an easier process as 20-50 characters could take a while, enough for like team photos, a yearbook would be nice. In the last series I created a school newspaper using daz renders and plan to do more of the same in this one. This series is more for me to learn a lot of different things like python, dutch, spanish, conlangs, daz modeling, etc. this is my kitchen sink catch all.

whispers65 · July 19

Here is my first test this go around. My computer isn't that great. it's i7-4790 24GB AMD RX 580 8GB. Graphic card doesn't really play a part. I'm using iRay so all CPU. I need to win the lottery.

kyoto kid · July 19

...nice. One thing i do on character tests is use a lighting (not scene) HDRI to provide ambient lighting show all the details.

Pretty much in the same boat here computer ad finances wise. 14+ year old system: X58 motherboard, 6 core Xeon 5660, and 24 GB DDR2 memory. I do have a an old Titan-X 12 GB GPU but some of its VRAM is used to make up for the lack of RTX cores as well as system memory support.so it still renders a bit slow (thouhg not as glacial as on the CPU).

With the astronomical costs for memory, solid state drives and GPUs (thankfully I have a 12 GB 3060 still in the box). I hear you about needing to win a lottery. I need to update for Win 11 as my MB doesn't even have a TPM 1.0 module.

whispers65 · July 20

yeah my computer won't upgrade to windows 11 and under windows 10 was running super slow and hot all the time. I transferred over to Linux and am able to play games again without the overheating and so forth. had a few glitches along the way but it it's almost like getting a new machine again.

still the lottery. I worked for 40 years but I get absolutely 0. I'll turn 62 next year so social security should help. I have a hernia which doesn't help matters. and my sister just lost her job and so we are driving doordash every day. the lottery would make things so much easier. we live in a old house that is slowly sinking and falling apart. it drips when it rains. it's hot during summer and cold during winter. it's crazy. never thought I'd be in this shape.

but I can always dream of a new machine. and I try to be creative to deflect some of the depression.

kyoto kid · July 20

...still on Windows 7 Pro SP3 here as 10 didn't "float my boat" so to say. At the time of the "free" upgrade in 2015 I still had Home Premium and would have received 10 Home edition (which back then was like completely handing my system over to Microsoft) and given 7 had 5 more years before EOL (plus a couple more for extended support) I just stuck with it, as it has pretty much been trouble free. Yeah, it limits me to Daz 4.21 (due to Nvidia rivers) so I don't get some of newer tools to play with, like Omni hair shaders, but that doesn't stop me.

I thought about Linux but then dealing with the idiosyncrasies of Wine to run and render in Daz turned me away (I've been on the Daz to Linux thread and reading about the frustration of getting basic processes to work consistently was not worth it, retired hre and not being paid to be a software developer).

It would be nice if Daz was compiled for Linux but that does take resources and they are not a large company.

whispers65 · July 20

Well I don't know as much about Linux (read absolutlely nothing until I switched over) and so I cheated. I worked with Chatgpt to get everything setup. It still crashes on occassion, but under windows it did too. The main crashes I get are from my video card. RX-580 2048 8GB wannabe. It's not a true 580 and crashes. I have to underclock it by 7% to get it to work but by underclocking, everything works fine and stops the crashes. The trick always worked under windows. I had discovered the fix on YouTube. Under Linux it works good too. For me the best thing is it runs a lot cooler under Linux. due to this house, my bedroom can get up to 90F in the summer time. I know not optimal conditions but what can I do. Today the heat index is supposed to be up near 108F and 100s in the forecast high as far as the eye can see. Summertime in Texas is in full swing.

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