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Placing objects in MojoWorld is not entirely obvious. A great deal depends on the height of the camera above the ground. Scaling objects is complicated by the planetary context. The most common problem with placing objects is that they get created 'too far away' and then when they are scaled up so that they're 'visible' from the camera, they end up being way too huge. For the following discussion, I'll talk about MojoWorld primitives first and then imported models. Primitives MojoWorld primitives are complicated by the fact that they have an invisible 'scale factor' which means that the size shown in the primitive editor may have nothing to do with the 'actual' size of the object. The only time you can be sure that the size reported in the primitive editor dialog is the true size of the object is if you've never used the scale tool on the object. The initial drag-to-size will be shown accurately and typing values in to the primitive editor will also be accurate as long as the primitive in question has never been manipulated with the scale tool. If you don't care about the primitive's exact size, scale away! For the following example of placing and scaling primitives I started with a new file. I set up a crop window with a size of 200x200 as a reference. When I placed the spheres in the following two views, I started my drag-to-scale in the very center of the crop window and dragged until the sphere touched the edges of the crop window. For the red sphere, the camera was 10Km above the surface. For the orange sphere, it was at 1Km. The yellow sphere at 100m and the green sphere at 10m. Their radii from the initial drag-to-scale, as seen in the primitive editor, came out as follows (rounded to the nearest meter)
Four spheres, each placed with the camera at different altitudes above ground level. So, rule number one when placing objects is, "Be aware of your camera's altitude!" Primitives and Object Space Textures In this next image, the two spheres both look to be about the same size. You'll have to take my word for it when I say that they're both about the same distance from the camera, as they were both created with a simple click to place them. When MojoWorld primitives are placed with a simple click (as opposed to a drag-to-scale), they're created with a size of 0. I then went into the primitive editor for both and set one sphere to be 200 meters in radius and the other one to be 2000 meters in radius. I then used the scale tool to shrink the larger sphere down to appear the same approximate size as the smaller sphere.
The material on both spheres is exactly the same. The texture is a simple noise with the checkerboard basis. The Largest Feature Size was set to 50. For the sphere on the left that really is still 200 meters in radius, that texture results in those large squares. The sphere on the right which originally had a radius of 2000 still actually has that radius, even though that sphere has been shrunk down with the scale tool. That's what I mean by the invisible scale factor. It's obvious that the sphere isn't 'really' 2000 meters in radius, but according to the texture's concept of what 'object space' means, it is! Imported Objects There's no telling what size a model will be if it is placed with a simple click. There's a theory that there's an absolute size built into many model formats and that a simple click to place those objects in MojoWorld will create them at their correct size. A quick experiment with a Poser figure showed that it was coming in at 1 meter tall, which is a bit short for an average adult female human, so here's my trick for scaling imported figures... The first thing I do is put my camera down at eye-height, which for me is about 1.5 meters. Next, I create a box primitive with a simple click to place it. Then, in the primitive editor, I specify the length, width and height that would approximately enclose the figure I'm importing. The following screenshot shows my scaling box at 0.7 meters long, 0.5 meters wide and 1.6 meters tall.
This next screenshot is of a Poser figure placed with a simple click, then translated around until she's partly within the box. You want to make sure your model is partly within the box and not just obscured by it for this scaling trick to work, so slide the model around on the two horizontal axes until you're sure it's passing within the box.
Hot Tip! Typing a 'g' will ground your object! Here's what it looks like after I've scaled the figure - using _only_ the central black control handle to scale the figure uniformly. (Well, and using the translate tool to keep her inside the box. The important thing is that you don't use the scale tool on just one of the axes, otherwise your figure will be scaled out of proportion...)
Just for grins, here are a couple tiny renders of just the box and then the box with the Poser figure embedded in it. For a final render, you'll want to either delete the box or poke the eyeball out on the object list to hide it.
All of this is not required - there's no real reason to worry this much about scaling. For a lot of the images that Mo has done with Poser figures, I know that the figures are hundreds of meters tall. That's what happens when figures are placed with a camera high off the ground and scaled using the drag-to-scale method. But hey, if the figure _looks right_ in the scene, it doesn't matter that it's 500 meters tall. You'll find that most MojoWorld planets are quite exaggerated in scale, with mountains many times taller than anything found on our little ball in space - and some MojoWorlds have features which look like grains of sand but are actually kilometers across. All that being said, however, I believe that the closer one comes to accurately scaling the features and models in your MojoWorld creations, the more likely you are to get 'believeable' results.
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